Journal III

A teacher's purpose is not to create students in his own image, but to develop students who can create their own image.  ~Author Unknown

Day after day I’m living the experience of learning from every student in my classroom. Every day God gives me the opportunity to see that we are in the classrooms not to say how things are, but to discover together.

My third experience was great; and I can say that things went very very well. I was happy at the end of the class because I felt satisfied with the work I had done and because I received good comments only. My experience in the third class was very nice. I liked the way in which students involved in every single activity because this made the class more interesting and at the same time they work together. After teaching during almost a year I have proved that to make students be involved in the activities depends on the strategies teachers choose for developing their activities. Of course that we are not always going to make the hundred per cent of students participate, but at least the major part of them will do it.

Something I really liked from my third class was the last activity we developed. Because we were talking about past actions and using the past continuous, we developed an activity in which students used this structure. The activity was about the description of a picture. The students were given a picture that they had to describe using the past continuous, but I asked the students to narrate the picture. While the narrator was saying what had happened, the rest of the students had to dramatize the action. The narrator started the activity saying for example “yesterday morning I was walking around the park when I say John riding his horse…” The student that had taken the role of John had to do the action and so on. This was a very interesting and funny activity, but the most important thing was to observe how the students used the structure we were studying.

There are many things that I would do again if I had to teach the same lesson, but I have to keep in mind that as a teacher, I had to adapt the activities according to the students’ necessities. I will never stop learning from my students and my tutors teachers because every day is a new opportunity to learn new things from every person we meet.