Teacher's Job Never Ends...

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

We started the class with talking to students about communication (which is the week's theme). The teacher asked what students think is important in a friend's personality. We gave out a questionnaire on "What kind of friend are you?" Here, I helped elicit information from them and teach pronouns such as confident, generous, reliable and other words related to personalities. After they finished, we discussed it and shared our experiences with them. I thought it was helpful to open up with them, just to allow them to know that we are just a regular humanbeing just like them as well. We do make mistakes and are not perfect. From this activity, they learned more vocabulary words, practiced their speaking skills, and better their reading skills. After morning break, we had them complete exercises on Future tenses. Interestingly, the teacher had them do the exercises before teaching them the grammar points. I thought it was clever because the teacher was able to elicit her students' background on the grammar points. Then, she could emphasize more on the things they were weak at. However, this would work out well with higher levels. After lunch, they had a spelling dictation.

From my observation, students enjoyed the class even though, at times, they were silent. However, the teacher attempted to get them talk as much as she could by bringing up interesting topics to discuss in the classroom. She often connected the story told in the class to the chapter and the grammar points. Asking a lot of questions and when students had difficulties expressing their thoughts, she would try to help them, make corrections, and extended their knowledge in the language use. Also, she listened to their requests on preferred tasks and provided appropriate skills and materials to them. Furthermore, she hardly sat behind the desk to teach them.

After the class ended, the teacher, most teachers, wrote a log about what she taught and planned for the next day's teaching. She said, "teacher's job never ends!" I guess this is what all teachers find(or at least the ones who enjoy teaching). I thought, however, I would have done differently for today's lesson is to check the spelling dictation with them right away. Therefore, they knew how they did and be able to review it at home or later on. Also, it would help save her time in checking the papers.