One of the things that happens in Autumn at the school where I work is that the first few classes are filled with speeches and summer vacation.

Students in junior high have to finish their speech contest speeches. This involves a day of finishing and checking; a day of last minute finishes and practice; and a day of actual performances. The performance day is then followed by weeks of chasing down speeches from the winners and, in some cases weeks of fielding long explanations of why the winner totally cannot go the speech contest. There are usually no good excuses for not going, but every now and then the student recruits the homeroom teacher and comes up with a good explanation. I then tell them it’s their job to tell the next person in line they have to go.

High school students spend the first few classes doing some variation of “What I did on my summer vacation.” Some do a speech, others have to make a conversation. They hate it but it lets us see how well they do at past tense before we enter the actual lessons. It also lets us see if they remember any English and any class rules from the previous term.

These early days serve as a kind of transition period for both us and the students. The students arrive with a “why the hell are we doing this again?” attitude and we arrive with a “how the hell do we do this again?” attitude. A couple weeks of being lazy and making the students do all the work lets us stall until we get our legs back under us and gives us a chance to remember how to do this teaching thing.

Unfortunately, this term, we have a classes with huge differences in total lessons. This means we have to start teaching a lot sooner. I’m not sure we’re actually ready for that.