Tuesday 5 April 2011

DRAMA!

So, I had a dramatic day yesterday, and the Drama is still ongoing today.

One of the English teachers had asked me to take his secondes and run through Shakespeare in Love, starting and stopping the DVD and having them answer questions. Sounds easy enough, right? WELL, the catch is, the class in question was 30 low-level secondes. Wonderful.

To be fair, the teacher had asked me if this was okay last week, and I had said yes, because he has been really great and nice, and I figured I'd do him a favour. I also figured discipline wouldn't be a big issue, because I take half of the normal class every other week and they are generally well-behaved.

What I didn't know was that to this normally well-behaved class there would be an addition of another half-class of secondes. Now, this class, which I had between Christmas and February vacances, were the single most horrible class I've ever had. For example, one boy made fun of my French and refused to work, preferring to spit on other people's paper and throw things around the room.

Cut to the class; PANDEMONIUM. I shouted and yelled, telling the bad ones to sit down and be quiet (which they ignored), and generally had a terrible time of it. Until twenty minutes in. What I didn't know was that the teachers had stationed two surveillants in the classroom next door (obviously to provide backup!).. One of them appeared at the door and took the worst boy out of the class, never to return. This shut them up for about ten minutes, then they started up again. I managed to quieten them down a bit, and another surveillant came to the door to check that I was ok. I said I was managing, and he said he would be next door in case I needed him. Which was great. I kept the door open and told them that if the surveillant heard them he would come back and they'd be in trouble. They were quieter, but refused to do the work, saying they didn't understand anything blah blah, even when I explained, then translated the questions for them.

At the end of the class, another lovely surveillant came to tell me that I have to write a report about what happened, and why things went so wrong. Which I have done. I also told the two teachers whose classes I had what happened, and they were appalled. They said they were going straight to those classes to tell them off and give them detention, and that they were so sorry I had to deal with it, that it was completely unacceptable. They also told me to put down the names of the worst troublemakers, and depending on the decision of the CPE (who I spoke to as well - she was disgusted), they could get suspended from school. They said that if it had been a simple case of being disruptive, they would just get detention, but because they had been making fun of me again it was a far more serious disciplinary issue, and suspension was the normal course of action.

Eek.

I've to hand in the report this afternoon. I'll keep you posted on what happens next!

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