WEEK 2 - Meeting the students

This past week was the first week I spent with the students. Because I am teaching level 1 and level 5/6, I basically have 4 classes of freshmen and 1 class of seniors. With the seniors, I spent almost the whole week working on community building and getting the students comfortable just speaking in Spanish. With the freshmen, I spent quite a bit of time talking about expectations and working on nipping behavior issues in the bud right away.

I think my level 1 kids are more afraid of me this year than my level 1 kids were last year. I'm trying to set a serious tone in class, letting the kids know that even though we're in a Spanish class, it's not going to be just tacos and piñatas all year. They've already had 1 quiz, and I've already come down hard on one student who was goofing off in class. I'm determined to avoid the behavior issues I had to deal with last year. My strategy is to come down really hard at the beginning, and ease up later on.

Class sizes are small this year. My level 1 classes have: 31, 30, 28, and 32. My level V/VI has only 18 (13 in V, 5 in VI), but that's pretty rare and only happens because there were so few students who jumped right into level 2 or 3 when the were freshmen.

Here are my hours for the week.

Sun	8/26/2012	6:30 PM	9:30 PM	3
M	8/27/2012	7:00 AM	6:45 PM	11.75
T	8/28/2012	7:15 AM	7:15 PM	12
W	8/29/2012	7:30 AM	5:00 PM	9.5
		7:30 PM	9:00 PM	1.5
Th	8/30/2012	7:45 AM	7:15 PM	11.5
		9:00 PM	9:30 PM	0.5
F	8/31/2012	7:30 AM	5:00 PM	9.5
Sat	9/1/2012	8:00 PM	9:45 PM	1.75
	Total:			61