Walking Into a Class Halfway Through the Year

I started a long-term occasional assignment this week, teaching Grade 7 and 8 drama and Grade 7 English. There is a particular challenge in arriving in March. The class is not new. It has its own history, its inside jokes, its established way of treating one another, and I am the one who is new. I am the guest in a room that already has its rhythms.

So I have spent these first days listening more than directing. Before I ask students to take any risk in a drama exercise, they need to believe the room is still safe now that the adult at the front has changed. We have done low-stakes games where there is no wrong answer, and I have watched carefully to see who hangs back and who steps forward.

There is a Catholic dimension to this that I take seriously, and it is one of the reasons I want to teach in this kind of school. Every student in that room is made in the image of God, and that is true of the confident ones and the ones who will not meet my eye. My job in these first weeks is not to impress them. It is to convince them, mostly through how I treat them, that I see each of them as worth my attention. The drama can wait a few days. The trust cannot.