Last class in advanced I

Well, the second period is done people. Let me tell you that this time I felt comfortable with my job in the classroom. The communication with my tutor was better than the last time, much better. This time, I was only in charge of the practicing part about narrative tenses; nevertheless, I had to study the topic again since I just remembered a little and I wanted to be sure and, mostly, prepared in case that a student came up with a question. Fortunately, everything went on well.  The last class, I had had problems with discipline. So this time, I was very clear with the class and told them to please respect me. I told them that the fact that I was doing my practices did not give them the right to disrespect me.

I got into the classroom and as I know my tutor, as a warm up, I just asked questions about narrative tenses to which the students responded me wisely.  Right away, I started the class checking a homework they had in the book. To solve this took me like 15 minutes. Afterwards, I developed a fill-in-the-blank activity (all of the activities were written as they had already been practicing speaking). For this, I gave the class 15 minutes as the page contained several exercises. Right after, I started to check. I did the first one and then, I tried to include everyone in the class so that each of them could tell me his/her answer. By the moment a student was telling me the last answer, I had spent 50 minutes of my time, so I knew that it was time to finish. I decided to start the last activity that I had for them which was a reading. I gave directions and they started to work. The rest of the activity was developed by my tutor, hopefully. It was in this way that I developed my last practice of the second period. It’s been a tough period with the practices and I’m hoping to have a better one next time. Thank you for reading. Blessings.

2nd practice! Advanced English I

Hello guys!!  Almost done with the 2^nd period!

Let me tell you that I did not have a good experience in this opportunity. I can say that the communication with my tutor was the problem. However, that does not mean that I blame him for what it happened. I will share with you the difficulty I had. First, I had prepared some points of the lesson plan I had. Then, I looked for an extra activity. What I did not know was that my partner had already taught what I was supposed to teach that day. Even worse, I did not realize that till I get to the university minutes before teaching my class. I waited for the teacher and explained to him what it was happening. He told me that I could developed some pages of the book. I accepted the challenge; nevertheless, I must say that I was not comfortable with the class. It was like if I was improvising. I felt that I had not prepared anything and it was not because I did not work but for any reason this happened. Plus, the group did not collaborate in my class. I really got annoyed because of that. I started the class with the activity that was supposed to be extra. For sure that before, I developed a warm up.

As you can see the class was not developed the way I expected to do it. I felt everything it was wrong. When giving me feedback the teacher told me that not everything had been bad at all. The positive side of this was that I learned that things are not always the way we expect them to be. It can happen to anybody and we have to be prepared for everything.

I close for this time, and I would like you to share with me some comments about what you do when people are not with a good disposition or attitude in the classroom. I have tried some things and some of them have worked and some others have not. I tried to do my best but this time I could not do it. I had never faced a situation like this but still I learned something good from something bad. I hope that you did not have any difficulty people. Keep calm and teach nice!!

First experiencie, second period!!

How are you doing bloggers?  I hope everything’s fine! Well, this time I want to share with you my first experience of the second period. I taught to the Advanced English I group. I think that I did it well; however, I have to say that I could have done something better; I think that the class was too simple; to be sincere, I did not follow the lesson plan because I considered the time of some activities was going to “steal” me some time. I prepared exactly the 50 minutes on my own; for sure, I prepared something about the topic, which was the future continuous and future perfect.

For starting the class, I wrote on the board a quote saying something about the future as I was going to talk about that. I told the class that, to some extent, we can predict our future. Afterwards, I wrote on the board “what will you be doing tomorrow in this time tomorrow?” they responded me with simple future, and I wrote that on the board. In that way I had introduced the topic as I made the contrast with future continuous tense. Then, I explained the grammar part in a very general but clear way. After that, I asked them to give me some examples to see if they had gotten it, and I could see that most of them did it. As I noticed that, I developed this activity called predictable future.

Predictable future

Have each person in your class write down what he was doing each hour of the day yesterday. Then have students exchange papers and rewrite their classmates’ schedules assuming tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.

Later on, I developed another activity which consisted on rolling a dice. Once that I have developed it, I could see that the students enjoyed it. The next step in the agenda was the future perfect. I did almost the same that I did with future continuous; I explained in a general way; I provided examples and then I made a comparison between the two tenses.

I told them that the future continuous was like the equivalent of what the past continuous is for the simple present.

After explaining all those points and giving the students some practice, I finished and thanked the students for their collaboration and I was done with the first class of the period.