Thursday, April 20th, 2023

Hi there everybody,
At the risk of having my colleagues be mad at me for doing projects and not something else all year, I’m going to confess something that I’ve been feeling bad about all school year:

My older students this year (so I don’t outright out myself) have not really been doing much grammar since the beginning of the year. The positive “action” today is: it’s the first day that I am confident I did some grammar.

Some context

All year, I’ve been thinking that it’d be nice to have a project where the students study their own grammar rules and they create their own questions and teach each other grammar. However, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find any examples of that kind of activity.

The problem was also time: I think I may complain about this bad habit a lot but… I have difficulties with timing my activities appropriately. An activity can take longer or a shorter amount of time than I expect, and that can be due to my students’ lack of interest or my own.

I guess another problem can be: motivation. My students are not motivated to learn grammar at all and while I know that it’s not good to think this way: I don’t like it when they’re not happy with a project, if that makes sense. They always complain about anything we do though, so I guess I really shouldn’t have thought and thought and thought.

My imposter syndrome is the last problem. Who am I to teach these enriched students grammar? I think this often, but as I read their essays and written evaluation, I realize: Bleh, they really need me to teach them some grammar. And as time goes by, I realize I’ve been a terrible teacher to them and I’ve probably ruined them for my colleague. He will probably tell me this later next year and I’ll anticipate it as I do with the students I had last year…

---

What did I do today?

Today, as I’ve explained to one of my groups and as I will explain to the next group tomorrow morning, we are in an awkward stage of in-between with another big project and the end of the other project about V for Vendetta. There are a few more classes before we can start the actual project, and since we have time, I’ve decided to make them do the grammar project as explained above.

Almost all of them participated VERY well to the project. It made me very happy to see them engaged with the language (for the most part) and realize some things that I wanted them to realize. This is another “I did this sort of out of nowhere” project, on a whim, just like V for Vendetta, but I did think about this project all throughout the year, so it didn’t feel as much as if I had only just finished the PowerPoint presentation that I explained to my students.

I thought it was pretty positive and I hope this helps me realize that I am not really an imposter? Maybe. We’ll see next year.

---

Have a great day, everybody!
PV