Terrible first lesson with my pupils

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hi,

i've graduated from a teacher training college. right now i'm teaching to college kids (1st and 2nd year). i also had practice teacher sessions (i'd prefer call it "teaching practicum, btw) in my last mester at uni with 10th graders. In restropect, i felt that it was rather uneasy. they did give me a hard time. i remembered that i spent a lot of time doing lesson plans, w/o refering to teacher's guide (my stupidity!). When I had to teach, at 1st i started the lesson with warm-up activity and they always extended the time (should be over 15 mins for each activity). i thought then that must be b/c of my poor management, now, i think that they did "smell my social insecurity". LOL I loved my activity, though, and put a lot of effort in designing interesting ones. It is very disheartening for me to endure the silent atmosphere of the class while in other classes of other teachers, they seem to be rather entertaining and lively. it was really horrible b/c i felt like not wanting to go to the class any more. everytime i was able to drag my legs to the class, i started to feel scared, LOL. but i did what i could then, so no regret, i believe that my lessons were well-designed.
my advice: admit your social insecurity to the kids, you'll feel better and more confident. i did that to my college classes, it seems to work well until now. i intentionally acted rather timidly, spoke quite fast, use english almost all the time, and i felt better. i think only when the teacher's confident, then the students will benefit. am i right? LOL, why am i feeling quite uncertain about the point that i'm trying to tell you here. anyway, good luck.

ps: today one student in my class send me an email, requesting me to speak more clearly and use mother tongue in the class, hmm, i don't get her point and i'm not sure how to respond her, either!

cheers,

But I don't feel social insecurity; I only don't like stupid people and don't like teaching and I have problems of this kind that I can't judge what level our exercises should have, whether they should be easy or maybe rather more difficult. Two lessons ago we discussed Present Simple Tense because they had claimed they were really very poor at it so I prepared exercises which contained basic things but later I felt foolish because they knew exquisitely well how to deal with that kind of exercises and their knowledge of that tense was good. I also don't like all those questions asked by my pupils and I especially hate it when they all ask the same questions which were already asked by their mates a minute ago and it's annoying when they all start asking questions in the same time.

They are very poor at English so I can't use this language because I'm afraid I wouldn't be understood. They have problems with basic vocabulary, names of clothes and in many cases answering a question: "How old are you" is a task far beyond their capacities because they are still using a construction taken from our native language and asked, say: I have 14 years instead of correct version

man, what prision are you assigned to teach?

Those kids are out of control, its not you!

Now I teach only 10 people out of 23 because the rest said that they're unable to learn anything in such a noise. In last year there were two groups - boys and girls so at least girls who are usually calmer and more concentrated on acquiring knowledge could learn in silence. I asked one of my male students if in last year situation used to look the same:
- "Yes, the boys were noisy as well."
- "And were you able to learn then?"
- "No"
- "And how did your previous teacher react then?"
- "Later she didn't react at all because it didn't help"


And it's something I wrote once on WP about my practice: "Those stupid girls I am forced to teach are still making stupid comments concerning me, for example recently I was wearing a blouse whose pattern is like those spots on leopard's fur and she said something about this. Also during this lesson one boy tried to set fire to his friend's hair (he's not a crazy pyromaniac, it was a "joke" ".