Classes

What is it like at my new school? What am I teaching? How are my students?

Those are the questions I've been getting the most often, and, according to my parents, the ones they have been getting the most often from people at church.

My new school is Easter High School, on the Easter College campus. I mentioned in my last entry that I had come to tour the school and had found out a bit of my schedule. I thought for this entry I'd walk you through a week of my classes, and explain what will be covered in each class.

Broadly speaking, I will be helping to teach three levels of Christian Education, which is normally referred to as CE classes. The high school has four class levels: 7^th and 8^th grades, third and fourth year students. The dichotomy in what the student levels are called points to the differences in education systems. The third and fourth year students are part of the old curriculum, while the 7^th and 8^th grade students are part of the new curriculum. In a few years time the high school will be continuing on to 12^th grade to better match up with other Asian countries.

I help out in teaching CE to the upper three years. Each year has classes twice a week, and I get to participate in most, but not all, of the class sessions. Currently my schedule is Mondays and Wednesdays I have CE with third years. Tuesday and Thursday I have eighth grade. Friday I see fourth years. Their other class is on Wednesdays and conflicts with the third year classes, so that is the class I only see once a week.

In eighth grade the students are studying the Bible; Old and New Testament, learning a bit about the structure of the Bible and studying stories for moral values. I'm getting a bit of a workout remembering my Old Testament right now and plotting out a coursework to get through the majority of it before the fourth quarter, when we have to switch into the New Testament. It's been a while since I have had to think about the Bible on a high school level, I keep having to scale myself back from my college coursework. Currently in the course we have just finished Jacob and will work through Joseph in the next class. We finally exit Genesis and head on to Exodus on Thursday!

In third year, the students are studying church history. This is not my strongest area, and unfortunately this is also the course I have observed the least, as afternoon classes were canceled last Monday for the end of Filipino language month celebrations. I will be talking with the course teacher in a bit to see what will be covered and how he wants to co-teach the class.

Fourth year students are studying Christian Living, which looks at applying values learned from the Bible into their modern lives. The past week and a half we spent on the Ten Commandments, and this was one of the first classes where I started helping plan lessons and teach. Last Friday I had the students re-write the commandments in their own words to make sure they understood them, and then led a bit of a discussion to see what they had come up with. I found that a large group didn't know what adultery actually was, though some of them knew it had something to do with sex. I really enjoyed a chance at a more debate/participatory style for this course, as this is a subject that cannot simply be taught by lectures.

The other class I'm helping out with so far is Practical Spoken English. The teacher for this class was rejoicing over having an actual native speaker at hand to show how words are pronounced in American English. Last Friday's class was about the th sound, which is not part of the local Ilocano dialect. I had a silly moment or two in front of the class showing exactly how you moved your tongue in your mouth to form the sound: flicking the tip of the tongue off of the back of your top front teeth.