This chapter highlighted significant events that occurred to the participants throughout their first year of teaching, encompassing the problems resulting from their reality shock, the possible causes they perceived that contributed to their reality shock, the way they approached the problems, the types of coping strategies they adopted, and the potential factors that they believed to reduce their reality shock. All the events were described in chronological order, starting from the time before the fall semester began to the time after the spring semester ended. The stories of the
participants were illustrated in the following order based on the similarity of their school contexts: Merlin, Lily, Ronda, Betty, and Angel.
Merlin
Before the semester began, Merlin was worried if he could get along well with his future students. Having studied and done practice teaching in a boys’ high school, Merlin found that male students in general were outgoing and interactive. Since it was his first time teaching in a girls’ high school, Merlin was concerned if female students were also interactive in class and hoped not to be neglected. He was also concerned about whether he could successfully blend in with his future colleagues. Since his administrative work was mainly about designing and adjusting the class schedule for the entire faculty members, Merlin had to frequently interact with his colleagues that he was yet to be familiar with. Due to the unfamiliarity, he was under great pressure and afraid that he might misbehave or offend his colleagues during the work.
In the first month after the semester began, as Merlin had foreseen, he
encountered problems regarding students’ reaction and attitude in the class. He found that his students were more than just being less interactive. In fact, he was shocked
and discouraged by how quiet his students were in the first few weeks, and even started to have doubts in his teaching competence.
When I walked into the classroom and found that the students were so quiet and did not even want to respond to my questions, I started to ask myself, “Am I not teaching well enough?” I did not like myself being easily affected by my students’
reactions. I felt so inexperienced. I remembered one day after the class, I walked back to my office and felt totally discouraged by their quietness. I looked up at the ceiling and started wondering about how incompetent I was. (Merlin, September 7, 2016)
Another example of Merlin being emotionally affected by his students’ reactions was one incident in which a student questioned his authority and profession by comparing him to her classmate and claimed that his English was less proficient.
It is true that her [the classmate] English is better than mine in terms of pronunciation. After all, she has been living abroad for more than ten years. I can understand that students tend to judge a person’s English proficiency simply by pronunciation. But they need to know that speaking is not the only aspect to focus on. Even though I know that student was not meant to say it, I was still hurt.
(Merlin, September 7, 2016)
As the time moved on, Merlin gradually found that his students became more engaged in class and were willing to answer his questions. He also successfully established his authority through teaching. However, students were not always
responsive. Merlin found that it was hard to predict his students’ reactions in the class because the condition of their classroom engagement varies from classes to classes.
After consulting with his colleagues, he realized that it was a common phenomenon among students and it seemed that every teacher in the school would encounter the same problem occasionally. Therefore, he decided to carefully observe his students’
reactions in the class to identify certain factors that influence their engagement in the class and at the same time adjusted his mindset to accept this phenomenon.
In addition to the problems of students’ reactions, Merlin was over occupied by
the administrative work and consequently had insufficient time to prepare for his teaching, which not only somewhat influenced the quality of the instruction but also aroused his negative emotions. To Merlin, the content of the administrative work was not difficult at all. What puzzled him was the fact that he had to either spend
additional time on completing a certain task, or sacrifice the time that he had already spared for teaching preparation in order to accomplish a sudden task.
It is really hard to predict when you will be assigned tasks and how much time you need in order to accomplish a certain task. If a teacher suddenly calls for a sick leave, I have to rearrange his class right away. Sometimes, the tasks were so time-consuming that I did not even have enough time to go through the teaching materials that I made before the class, and I could not help but go to the class without being fully prepared. (Merlin, October 19, 2016)
The overwhelming administrative duties also led to problems of interpersonal relationship. Merlin was concerned whether he was able to establish a sense of
belonging with his colleagues since the office where he stayed was far from the office where most of the English teachers were in, and he also had to frequent the Office of Academic Affairs to handle administrative duties. During the time from the beginning of the semester to the first monthly exam, even though he had already met most of the English teachers, Merlin only had close contact with two of them simply because they were in the same office and sat closer to one another. The unfamiliarity with the faculty members would occasionally cause Merlin to reminisce about his practice teaching experiences since he had established a strong sense of belonging to that school, which critically reduced his willingness to assimilate into Rose Girls High School. To overcome this problem, Merlin decided to join the table tennis club in which the members consisted of current and retired teachers of the school, and the place where they practiced was just right next to his office.
Merlin also encountered other interpersonal problems while instructing students
to participate in the Teen Diplomatic Envoys, a well-known national English contest.
In Rose Girls High School, it was the school library that was responsible for the results of the contest and appointed English teachers to train the contestants. During the training, Merlin had to cooperate with another English teacher, whom he did not know how to interact with because this teacher liked to exaggerate the things he heard and spread the words to others. Merlin was under pressure whenever he was with this teacher since he had to be cautious about the words he said and the decisions he made.
Additionally, Merlin was stuck in a dilemma about how much effort he should make to train the contestants because he received different expectations from the director of the school library and the chairman of English teachers. The director considered this contest a glorious event and thus asked the instructors to make most of their effort to help the students win the prize, while the chairman saw it as a stressful burden and did not want the instructors to do things beyond their reach. At the end, Merlin reached a compromise between the director and the chairman, and decided to simply do things within his capability and hoped the students could perform well in the contest.
Instructionally speaking, the problems that Merlin faced were minor and manageable. He was slightly concerned about falling behind his tentative teaching schedule since the knowledge he wanted to pass on to his students was considerable.
He hoped to carefully lead the students through every section of the textbook in order to develop their knowledge of how to learn English, such as the importance of using collocations in memorizing words, understanding the organization of an article, and comprehending the logic of certain sentence patterns. He believed that he could gradually solve this problem once he became more familiar with the students. Another pedagogical problem Merlin faced was lesson planning. Instead of not knowing what to teach, Merlin spent a great amount of time pondering on the procedure of his teaching, such as the way to smoothly move from one section to another, and how to
make the teaching materials more organized, effective, and concise. Initially, he made an attempt to modify his teaching based on his professional knowledge and prior teaching experiences. Nevertheless, the problems still remained. Hence, he decided to turn to his mentor, Gary, for further assistance.
In Rose Girls High School, every new teacher, both substitute and tenure track teachers, would be assigned a mentor to stimulate their adaptation to the school environment and cope with the problems they faced in their first year of teaching.
Gary was an experienced teacher who was constantly invited to give a speech to different high schools and be the judge of teacher recruitment tests. He was also an acquaintance of Merlin because they had been studying in the same master program.
Moreover, Gary was an active mentor who was always willing to share everything he had with Merlin and would regularly check with Merlin to see if he needed support.
To Merlin, Gary was not like a formal mentor but more as a sincere friend or buddy.
Before the semester began, Gary had already met with Merlin and gave him a general introduction to the culture and characteristics of the school and the faculty members. He also shared the teaching materials he designed with Merlin, such as the vocabulary handouts, which was later modified and applied by Merlin to his own teaching. What’s more, after the semester began, Gary had invited Merlin to observe his class for several times, from which Merlin had learned ways to refine his teaching and found solutions to the problems he faced. For instance, he became aware of how to fluently shift from one section to another, and learned to use group works or competition to reinforce students’ classroom engagement. From observing Merlin’s classes, Merlin also learned to design interesting activities that were closely related to the theme of a lesson as a warm up through various means.
Aside from the assistance of mentor, Merlin had attended different seminars and workshops to extend his professional knowledge. Every week, the English teachers in
Rose Girls High School would organize at least one seminar, in which they would invite either one of their colleagues or teachers from other schools to share their teaching experiences. The content of the sharing had inspired Merlin to come up with different ways to fine-tune his teaching. For example, from one workshop, Merlin had learned to incorporate the elements of board games into his vocabulary teaching and material designs. He found pictures that showed the meaning of the vocabulary and asked the students to put the correct words under the pictures, which turned out to be useful in promoting students’ critical thinking ability and testifying their
comprehension of the meanings of the targeted words.
After the first monthly exam, Merlin’s feelings of reality shock had been reduced and he had made some improvement in managing the preceding problems in the first two months. Students’ reactions, attitude, and engagement in the class were no longer serious concerns to Merlin. To cope with the problem of students’ classroom
engagement, he followed Gary’s advice and combined group competition with rewarding mechanism into his teaching, which succeeded in promoting students’
willingness to participate in class. As for the problems of students’ reaction, since Merlin had become more familiar with his students, he became accustomed to the quiet classroom atmosphere and had developed ways to break silence and bring energy and life to the class. For example, he would spend a great deal of time preparing jokes and interesting anecdotes beforehand to share with his students, or used the cat he kept as a topic to draw his students’ attention whenever they appeared to be tired, bored, or too quiet. The familiarity with his students also helped him to be more adequate to control the pace of his teaching, and thus resolved the problem of falling behind his tentative teaching schedule.
The relationship between Merlin and his students had also been significantly improved. He had become very popular among the students he taught. Some students
even set up a fan page for him on Facebook to show their admiration. After the class, Merlin would stay in the classroom for a while and chat with his students. It was the good teacher-student relationship that helped Merlin to develop his sense of belonging to the school. Instead of being content with or overconfident in the improvements he made, Merlin still remained cautious about interacting with his students because Gary had reminded him that good teacher student relationship might cause his students in different classes to compete for his attention and love.
I have two classes that are near to each other. Sometimes, students in one class may want to know what I did or shared in the other class, so I have to be fair.
Some students even complained to me that they felt neglected and jealous only because I stayed in the other class longer than in their class. (Merlin, October 19, 2016)
The amelioration of Merlin’s relationship with his colleagues also helped
establish his sense of belonging to the school. During the period between the first and second monthly exam, Merlin was busy training the participants of Teen Diplomatic Envoys. As the competition approached, he even had to spare his weekends for additional training. It was the tremendous care and support from his colleagues that helped him go through this difficult and exhausting period of time.
I was helped by many of my colleagues during the training. One of them helped order the dinner for the contestants and I right before the competition. Anther colleague helped me compose the test sheet of the weekly listening quiz because she noticed that I was overwhelmed by the competition and other administrative duties. The chairman of English faculty would occasionally check upon me in person or by messages through social networking sites to make sure if I was fine.
I was really touched by what they had done to me. (Merlin, December 15, 2016) At last, Merlin helped the contestants win the fourth place, which broke the record of the school history. The result of the competition affirmed the devotion and effort that Merlin had made. The achievement also had helped him establish his authority in the school and finally be recognized by the school administrators and his colleagues. He
found that his colleagues went to talk to him more often after the English contest, which effectively eased his concerns and helped consolidate his sense of belonging to the school.
Even though the majority of the problems had either been resolved or mitigated, a few of them still persisted and even became aggravated as the time went by. During the time between the first and second monthly exam, Merlin was still constrained by the problem of having insufficient time, and the situation exacerbated because of the excess of work in hand. Aside from his regular administrative duties, as previously mentioned, Merlin devoted a great amount of additional time to preparing students for the Teen Diplomatic Envoys. He also needed to instruct students in the English debate club. Meanwhile, to enhance his sense of belonging to the school, he joined the
faculty table tennis club, which required him to allocate additional time to practice as well. It was challenging for Merlin to strike a balance between the things he wanted to do and the things he was assigned to do. The problem of having difficulties in
managing time well had affected Merlin’s quality of teaching. For instance, he did not have sufficient time to finish composing his vocabulary handout for the second
monthly exam. Before the first monthly exam, he had compiled a vocabulary
handbook that included all the targeted words in four lessons. Nevertheless, after the first monthly exam, due to the excess work in hand, he was unable to finish making the vocabulary handbook in time. Instead, he was only able to make and distribute a vocabulary handout by lesson. Merlin was concerned that his incapability of making the vocabulary handbook in time would ruin his professional image in his students’
mind. He was worried that his students might not understand how busy he was and saw it merely as an excuse.
Another problem that still disturbed Merlin throughout the first and second monthly exam was lesson planning, particularly on the aspect of ways to formulate
appropriate ideas for activities and to design a feasible teaching schedule. Even though he had observed his mentor’s teaching, Merlin found it difficult to apply what he had learned to his own teaching since he was still inexperienced. He tended to spend long period of time pondering over ideas, such as the content of the handout and warm-up activities in order to effectively facilitate students’ learning. “It did not take much of my time to make handouts once I knew exactly the things I wanted to do,” said Merlin (October 19, 2016). Due to his lack of experience, Merlin
encountered problems of being unable to achieve his lesson objectives. In one class in which he was teaching collocations to his students, he had expected to go through 25 collocations listed on the handout. However, it turned out to be too much for the students. He then modified his plan by making some of the collocations as homework and only highlighted a few collocations that were important in another class. Merlin believed that he could not overcome the problems of lesson planning until he became more experienced.
At the end of the fall semester, Merlin had almost accommodated to his teaching role in Rose Girls High School. He was no longer vulnerable to the lifeless classroom atmosphere and had developed useful strategies to promote his students’ participation in class. In regard to teaching, Merlin had made progress in sticking to his teaching schedule after realizing the importance of being flexible.
When I was doing practice teaching, I was very discreet and stubborn. I would plan everything ahead and be determined to achieve every goal that I set for each class. I would be extremely upset if I could not accomplish one goal. The same thing happened at the beginning of the semester when I first taught in Rose Girls High School, which caused me tremendous pressure yet forced me to adjust
When I was doing practice teaching, I was very discreet and stubborn. I would plan everything ahead and be determined to achieve every goal that I set for each class. I would be extremely upset if I could not accomplish one goal. The same thing happened at the beginning of the semester when I first taught in Rose Girls High School, which caused me tremendous pressure yet forced me to adjust