Teaching!

I've been sick for a bit so I'll be posting two posts this week to make up for one week! I wanted to specifically talk about my experience teaching in the Czech Republic. I have had different experiences with children who may elicit similar but distinguishable struggles; when it came to teaching at the school in the Czech Republic there was a very apparent language barrier that both partys endured and continiously became a wall of hinderance for any form of full expression.

An experience I've had teaching has only been targeted for developmentally delayed children, I realized that sometimes when I try and instruct an activity in hopes of them adapting to the situation, it always seems to be a ongoing battle between having them attempt to grasp the concept and trying to have a common ground with their behavior/dealing with frusterations. Many of the children that maybe have some sort of obstructive IEP'S have the tendancy to form learning impairments in addition drastically augment their life to some level. These children are started on meds at a very sensitive period in their life, and actually in the long term in my opinion cause even more damage physically and emotionally. I'm not the strongest advocate for medicine period, and when I see children who have a diagnosis of ADHD or autism on high dosese of chemicals it tears my heart. Why can't the world support channeling those same hyperactive behaviors into something constructive? What's even more frusterating is that many of the diagnosis' have a lack of validity, how does one determine if a child is affected by something else.

I just wanted to relate to an experience, and it made me realize a stuggle is a struggle whether its being developmentally delayed or a language barrier these situations help us chart how to map the unknown terrorities and make us more active to confronting challenges

Now that I'm done with my tangent,I kind of found that similarly in other stuggles, that the Czech students needed some scaffolding along the way, even though their english was bountiful I'm not sure if we filtered our english to accomadate to their needs. We definately tried breaking words up, and maybe even trying to relate certain topics to the Czech history trying to utilize elaboration but it seemed as though they were only responding to surface words and not comprehending to a deeper extent. Our group apparently only had 2 years of english according to the teacher. It was definately a learning exprience and personally for myself I felt as though I was encountering a disequilibrium, since it posed a challenge to myself. I definately don't know that much about linguistics with a lack of extensive experience to explain certain things super clearly, where they would be like Aha! I definately managed to learn from the exprience though and tried to expand my schematic network. I thought it was great that the students energy level was skyrocketing it made the teaching more enjoyable, and having the teachers serve as the supportive authoratative figures who were great transalators for a matter of fact. If it wasn't for the czech teachers I'm not sure if the kids would have understood as much as they did, we definately were independent in our teaching but at the end we had time for question and answer and some of the kids seemed as though they were a little hesistant to say anything it could be due to the foreign interactions. The teachers however really provided guidance for that portion, we ended up explaining to them in addition the US athletics/major athletes, facts about north carolina, and the US in general.