Hey friends, it's been way too long — the Gregor Newsletter is officially back! 😄👋

It’s been six months since I started working as a middle school teacher in Hägendorf as well as a student at teacher school in Luzern. This week my first school semester ended. 🥳

When I started this journey, I already knew it would be extremely busy. That’s why I paused many of my previous habits, such as learning Chinese, filming videos, and also the weekly ‘Gregor Newsletter’. ⏸️

After restarting Chinese in November last year, it is now time to also bring back this Newsletter. So, welcome or welcome back if you are reading this 😄

In this first edition I am going to reflect and share a bit about my last six months and how my journey as a teacher went so far. Let’s jump right in!

👨‍🏫 Teacher

The most intense time was right in the beginning, when I started my new work at August 11th. Besides teaching, I also had to figure out what materials to use, how the school rules and documentation works, learn how to collaborate with parents and colleagues, and much more. 😵

In the beginning I almost panicked, as my school wasn’t able to provide me complete sets of teaching material due to budget reasons. My principle and colleagues were very understanding and made it possible for me to buy the needed books, which was a big relief in the beginning. 😮‍💨 (Later I learned that it is fairly easy to work around such problems by making copies, but at that time I didn’t know that)

On August 19th (Tuesday of the second week) we already undertook our first school trip. I asked some colleagues for tips and got the advice that a hike and visit of a swimming pool would be nice, so that’s exactly what we did. I was kind of nervous about this, but even though some girls kept complaining about the hike, it all ended up really nicely and I think in the end everyone had fun in the swimming pool. 🏊‍♂️🏊‍♀️

In those first weeks it was very important that my students were able to settle in and get to know the rules. Here too I had great support from my colleagues, and in particular my classes math and science teacher J.S. is just fantastic. I’m so grateful I have a lot of support from the team, especially at the beginning.

To give you some example of what I was struggling with: We are using a software to make entries whenever students do something well or misbehave (”LehrerOffice”). In the first few weeks I always made notes on paper and made those entries in the system in the evening, or perhaps days later if I was too busy. Only after a few weeks did I figure out that I better make those entries in the system directly during the lessons. This way every other teacher can also see them right away and I avoid extra work at home.

📚 Teacher Student

A few weeks later, on September 4th, I also began studying at teacher school (Pädagogische Hochschule) Luzern. Due to my previous master degrees in Business I qualify for a shortened 3 year part time study program, which suits my needs perfectly.

When I talked to other teachers about my plan of starting as a new class teacher and studying at the same time, I was advised that this would be too much to handle together.

I myself though felt that I really had to do this, as I thought it would be reckless to take responsibility for a class and not try my best to do it properly. And learning how to be a good teacher is exactly what such a degree is about after all.

Im grateful that my school and in particular my principal N.Z. always supported me with this. They even cover my study fees. Amazing!

So starting September I had a packed schedule: Teaching on Tuesdays, Wednesday mornings and Thursdays; studying on Wednesday afternoons and Fridays. I also spent Mondays at school preparing my week.

We are a small group of just 30 or so students what started this program together, and many of them also already work as teachers. This makes the whole program extremely helpful and not as theoretical and abstract as teacher schools often appear to be.

Due to self selection bias and probably other reasons, the ideology of most people I interact with there is pretty far left. But the few other diverging opinion generally don’t get silenced, which I must say I am rather glad about.

🏫 Teaching, Studying, Iterating

Alright, so that’s how my weeks passed since September. The thing is, whenever I figured out one thing, other things become apparent that I could still do better. For example during the autumn vacations in October I figured out that my students really can’t organize their materials well due to limited space. Because of that I ordered a narrow Ikea Billy shelf for every student and spent a whole day during my vacations building those shelfs. Now every student and every subject has their dedicated spot where everything should go. I am happy to report that it helped a lot with organizing and also made it easily visible which students didn’t manage to organize well yet.

In November I started using “Merits”. In practice this means students can collect points whenever they do something good or nice. It is not a common practice in Switzerland, but widely used in some other countries. It provides an incentive to behave well and my student’s also say they like it, so I think I’ll keep using this. I’ll also write about this topic again in more detail in a future newsletter.

In December I started introducing weekly vocabulary tests. Every week my students need to learn 10 new words in English and 10 new words in French. These mini-tests are graded, but I only weight them as 10% of a normal grade. (Honestly this is a lot of extra effort because it means I need to correct those tests every week. However I think it’s worth it, as it is a really easy way for students to get good grades by a little studying. This hopefully also helps them to develop this good habit.)

In January, a colleague of mine came to visit one of my English classes and gave me some feedback. That was kind of embarrassing: She told me that I used too much German in my English class. It is very ironic that I would get such a feedback, since myself I am studying Chinese and I always try to avoid relying on non-Chinese resources so I can study ‘in the language’. My use of German has something to do with the provided teaching material being too difficult for my class, but in the end that is still lame. I will need to find better-suited / simpler teaching material so I can teach fully in English.

👋 Hello, 2nd Semester!

So, these are just some impressions from my first semester. I’m excited for the second one! There is so much more I could write about everything I mentioned in this newsletter, so let me know if you are curious about anything in particular and I’ll make sure to zoom in on it in one of my future newsletters 😄

If/when I find the time, I’ll also start making videos again. But I still need to be careful to avoid work overload (and still have enough time to spend with my lovely wife Xi 😍 + family and friends)

Have a great week everyone and warm greetings from Olten!

Gregor