The first two classes

So I show up around noon on my first day- a little stressed- I'd be teaching 2 classes that day- four hours in all.
So I show up, pour over my Kindergarten teachers guide for a while, and walk in there having a pretty good idea of what I want to do. I'd prepared 16 paper crowns- one for each of my kids with their names on the crown. My idea was that they could color the crown and put it on- then I'd take each of their pictures with my kodak camera (which comes with it's own printer) and print out two copies of the pictures- one copy would go home with me so I could memorize the kids names, and the other copy would stay at school (I ended up putting magnets on the back and putting the pictures next to the children's names on the board for when i would give them 'stars'- each kid got a star when they did something well, and five stars at the end of the day meant that they got a sticker.)
Kindy went great- those tykes were adorable (I assume they still are) and we all got along really well.
I was lucky because on this particular day, I had 2 and a half hours until my next class. I gloated over my kindergarten success and stared at the adorable pictures I had printed up and was so excited I planned a lesson for the next day of kindergarten. This took an hour or so- I still had an hour and a half to do my next lesson plan. (if you're keeping a tally, this is now 3 unpaid hours that I worked for hess on my first day - man, if only I'd kept a tally of the whole 10 months!!!)
I got the teaching materials and looked at the teachers guide.
Step Ahead 12, or F7N12 in Hess speak.
Ahhhh, step ahead 12.
First of all, the teachers guide was written in some sort of indiscernible shorthand. I flipped around, trying to get an overview of the whole class before I tried to understand that days lesson. After 20 or so baffling minutes, I decided to just focus on the days lesson, as the time for the class was drawing near.
First I was supposed to read some story book with them. I vaguely remembered from Hess training that there was supposed to be an order to this- first you were supposed to read aloud, sentence by sentence, and the class would repeat after you. then you'd go over the new words. Then...they read it again, line by line? One student read a line each? Or...you all read together? I couldn't remember exactly and by now was starting to panic- i only had an hour or so to plan. So I decided the reading part would be pretty easy, and skipped on to the grammar part, as I imagined that would be difficult.
The teachers guide said to start by writing a passive voice sentence on the board. Passive voice, what was that? Then I remembered - the book was thrown by me, as opposed to I threw the book. okay good good i had a passive sentence. So I was supposed to show them how the different sentence still meant the same thing, and how to change an active sentence into a passive one. So far so good. Then they were supposed to open their student books. I opened the student book to the indicated page.

It had absolutely nothing to do with passive or active sentences.

right.

The rest of the lesson planning went more or less along those lines.
I figured it was okay- once I got to know the students and what they were capable of, I would be able to present the lesson in an accessible, interesting way.
I did my best to understand the rest of the lesson, and went up to the classroom.

I don't know how it is at other Hess branches, but at my branch, nobody showed new teachers where to go or which room they were teaching in. I didn't have a room number, just the class name and the name of my co-teacher. I figured the rooms would be labeled with class names. I was wrong.
The result- me popping my head into all of the classrooms, making an ass of myself trying to figure out which kids were mine.
Great start.
So I finally get to the right class and start my lesson.
"Teacher!" the kids start crying, "teacher!"
I didn't know why they were saying teacher over and over- I soon found that this was their way of letting me know i was doing something wrong.
The co-teacher finally came up and told me to give the kids a quiz. A quiz? How could I quiz them when I didn't know what they knew?
I flipped to the previous lesson and decided to quiz them on the words they had learned the previous week. I thought, okay, three words, they spell each word and then write a sentence with the word in it.
I told them this and was met with blank stares. I wrote it on the board. Finally I wrote the first word and a sentence to give them an example.
I soon discovered that while the kids 'knew' the words- how to spell them and a definition, they had no idea how to actually use the words in a sentence.

What was worse, these kids couldn't understand a damn word I was saying. Beyond "Hello, how are you, what's your name?" they were completely lost- and even those questions could be difficult.
And I was supposed to explain passive and active sentences to them?
The rest of the class went by with staggering awkwardness.

where do I even begin?

Hess, on paper and in theory, has a great program. The lessons progress in a logical and cumulative way, each lesson building on the previous lesson, each level building on the previous level. Each week, the kids focus on 7 or 8 new vocab words and a new sentence pattern. Most of these sentence patterns are pretty good and pretty useful. There are some real crappy ones though- for example I spent one week asking kids "What do you do?" to which they were supposed to respond "I make a snowman." or "I look at lanterns."
I don't know about you or where you come from, but in my neck of the woods, when someone says 'what do you do?" you answer with your job title.
why wasn't the sentence "What are you doing?"
god only knows- the problem was that i was stuck teaching this non-nonsensical sentence over and over again and couldn't change it because all of the tests these kids would be taking had that sentence on them.
This problem- of teaching things you don't like or don't agree with or that don't make sense- extends far beyond the sentence patterns.
For example, the kids in step ahead 12 understood about 5% of the words coming out of my mouth, yet were supposed to learn the differences between passive and active voice- and were reading a somewhat complicated story that they understood very little of.

And yet, because Hess has it's program, I just had to continue teaching them more and more complicated things that they couldn't even come close to grasping.
I finally figured out what 'successful' hess teachers do- You get into a very predictable classroom routine, so kids know exactly what you're going to do and when. You GIVE them all of the answers, word for word, sometimes letter by letter- most often just letting them copy down exactly what you write off the board. Even the HOMEWORK--- In the teachers guide it says "go over the homework on page such and such" which I assumed meant you just explained the homework assignment- only to find out later that other hess teachers gave them every answer, every week, before the end of every class. Same with tests- go over the answers before hand- maybe not the exact answers but something so similar that a blind monkey with a stick could ace the test.
Parents- look, your child got a 97% on this incredibly difficult looking english test. See your child, head bowed over another amazing english assignment? They really must be learning this stuff. And they just keep progressing in the levels. Hess is great. All of your english dreams for your child are coming true. Just keep signing those checks!
yet why is it when a native english speaker asks them an incredibly basic english question "What color do you want?" or "what did you do today?" they are completely lost?

This, at least, is how I began to feel at my branch.
If the students had the BEST teachers, and they studied at home a great deal, and had someone to practice english with every day, maybe they would actually know what, on paper, they supposedly knew.

I found this whole situation very dis-heartening.
But luckily in that first class, i just blamed myself and decided to try harder.