There's something about me that keeps my students from being completely comfortable in class. They'll often whisper to a neighbor asking what something means or what I said—if they ask about it at all. And they ask in Spanish. More often than not I just repeat things like three times, and still no one is doing anything. I often give up and resort to my pitiful Spanish. This is not ideal.
Everyone (okay, that sounds like a lot of people. I usually have three or four who make it.) sits in the back row. Except one. Sometimes one of them ventures to the second-to-last row. They don't try to practice asking me questions in Spanish. Hardly ever, anyway. My biggest challenge has been to get people talking in class. I know there are some logical, practical reasons for this: they don't know tons of vocabulary, we've only studied the present and past simple tenses, we don't have anything to talk about. It'd just be nice to have students who were sometimes over-eager about speaking.
It just occurred to me that this could also be somewhat of an issue of men vs. women here. Because now that I think of it, when I had male students they were actually rather boisterous—that's a funny word, but it came to mind. Sometimes annoyingly so. So maybe I should appreciate these passive students.
Frankly, it's all just a daily reminder of how inept I am at practical conversation skills. I'd say that sometimes I've done all right. Maybe with closer friends, or with a really friendly person. But in reality, those times are, at best, simply passable. Usually I just end up getting fired up about something and trying to spew out all the thoughts that are tangling together in my over-eager mind. Or I'm just barely hanging onto a thread—desperately clinging to a possible key word used by the "sender" and doing my best to stay alert and on track. And I never know how to end conversations.
If I were better at laughing at myself, I'd have a lot to laugh about. But that's another toughie for me.
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