stREssFUl mE

I can finally take a little break to write my blog now. Starting from last Wednesday, I am having a frequent and close interaction with one of the class at INTERLINK. INTERLINK is a private institution that has a contract with ISU and assists ISU prospective students on their English abilities. Following is cited from INTERLINK website:

A majority of these students go on to ISU after meeting their needs at INTERLINK. Some students, however, study at INTERLINK for a variety of reasons.

Last week, I observed the Reading & Writing class for three days. The time of the class is from 8:30 to 10:20 and it's Mon. through Fri. I had to change my working schedule to work with the class. And Starting from this Monday, me and the regular RW teacher took our turns to teach the class. It's basically co-teaching, but I think I would teach the whole 2-hour class on Thursday or Friday.

There's several reasons that I'm kind of stressed out these days. It's been a while since I taught English last time. The age of the students in the RW class are way different from that of what I used to have in the past. I used to have elementary or junior high school students, but this time, I'm having future college and graduate students in my class. I had to look for suitable activities for teaching reading and writing sentences. The levels of the students are in a wide range, so I had to work very hard and think thoroughly on how to get every one of them involved in the activity and not feeling bored.

Today is the second day of my teaching, I felt much more better than yesterday. I couldn't have a good-night sleep since last Sunday, and I even dreamed of the sentence structure that I taught when I had the time to take my nap, which, as a result, made me more tired afterwards. But this is definitely a great opportunity for me to REGAIN my teaching confidence and to practice my teaching skills. Challenging task, but I think I'm kind of addicted to it.