Journal III, Third Period

After teaching my third class to the group of Intermediate English I, I consider that there are many things that I have improved and there are many things that have gone well till this day. I know that many things have gone well in the class; however, there are many other things that need to be improved as a teacher.

Thank God the objectives have been understood by the students and I consider that we have reached the objectives in every class. Today’s objective was about identifying the Present Perfect Tense. I didn’t know that the special gift for me during the last period of the teaching practicum was to teach grammar only. I have learned something important in this last period; a teacher doesn’t have to look for excuses for teaching grammar, but for a way to teach grammar differently.

After the warm up activity, I used a song for presenting the topic. The song was “Have you ever seen the rain?” the students had to order the slips of sentences to form the song. They all were involved. After forming the song they had the chance to sing together, and I consider that this was part they engaged and enjoyed the most because they like to sing.

As my previous classes, I had to teach grammar again, but have been using different ways for teaching grammar. In this occasion, the students were the responsible to create the grammar explanation. I provided them with the material, and they only had to stick the material on the board. It was really nice to see how the students create their own explanation. After doing this, they had to write some examples. The examples were in some envelopes. They only had to order the words to form sentences and they did it very well. The last part was about creating their own examples based on the explanation and using the verbs I provided them. By doing this, the student demonstrated me that they had understood the topic.

This was very important because all of them were involved in the activity, they enjoyed the activity and the most important aspect was the fact of practicing the language. I know that for teachers is not so easy to have all the students participating in every single activity, but I think that teachers must use strategies to make all the students participate in the activities.

This issue has not been easy for me, but I consider that what has helped me is the fact of showing confidence and enthusiasm when giving instructions. If the teacher doesn’t show enthusiasm, students won’t show enthusiasm either. Enthusiasm is a very important part of teaching.

After this class I have realized that there is a single thing that I will continue doing because this aspect will always help me in my teaching career no matter what level I teach. What I want to continue doing is keeping the enthusiasm in the class because this will help me as teacher to encourage myself to do things that I don’t like and enthusiasm will also help me to encourage my students to feel confident and to do things no matter if they make mistakes or not.

I have to remember that “The truth teacher is the one that teaches from the bottom of his/her heart.”