Teaching Journal

I arrived to the classroom a bit nervous and excited, I had studied my lesson plan and gone over it with the class teacher one day before, so the next morning I felt as ready as I could be. 20 students were supposed to be sitting in their benches in rows, however there were some people missing, I let 3 minutes pass as I settled my camera and got my material ready. The teacher introduced me as their trainee teacher for the day, and I introduced myself and explained I was studying languages and that one of the areas in my major was language teaching. My pronunciation was clear and my voice was loud enough for the students to pay attention. I smiled, moved along the classroom and made gestures that made me feel confident, the students seemed interested and excited about having me teach the class for the day. However when I explained that I would be recording the class, a female student looked nervous, I assured her this was only for me to reflect on my teaching abilities and that the camera would only record me throughout the class, this made her feel better, and I was glad. One of my favorite skills when I take language courses is writing, I am a good writer and I felt they could rely on my experience and that I could help them with their writing assignments with the fresh change of my lesson plan. I asked each student to tell me what ideas they had for their essay, one by one they told me their ideas and I could listen to their pronunciation and linguistic performance, I made a comment or asked a question for every one of them to let them know I had listened and understood, and also to help them start thinking on what they could write about this particular idea. After this warm up session, I asked them to open their books and look at an example of an essay and identify its parts. All of a sudden, the teacher who was sitting in one of the benches, stood up and what I felt is that she couldn’t help being the “real” teacher and asked the students to take out their rubrics, I was going to do that as we had talked about it the day before, was I doing something wrong? Did I spend too much time on the warm up activity? Trying to stay focused I took out my rubrics as well and told the students that their teacher and I had created a mind map of the parts of the essay that would help them, I used the board and explained the map, and then again, the teacher spoke but this time she told them that they should pay attention to the map I had sketched on the board and that the examples I was giving were what she expected for their essay, and encouraged them to copy the map or take a picture. Finally I told the students that they had the rest of the class to start writing an outline of their essay and that I would pass by each one of them to see what they were working on and help them in any way that I could. This way I felt I was connecting with each student because I helped most of them with grammatical errors, and made suggestions on what else they could write. A particular female student was feeling lost and couldn’t decide what to write about, since the essays were supposed to be on a historical event or an authority in their majors, and she was in her first semester and was just being introduced to her major, I encouraged her to search online for an authority or historical event in her major, I stayed with her a bit longer because she seemed very nervous and couldn’t decide even after searching online until finally she made up her mind and started her outline. Another male student suddenly called out teacher! And I wasn’t sure he meant me, but he mad eye contact and waved at me, so I went and helped him with a question he had, that felt nice, being called teacher even when the “real” teacher was there. And then, as I was ready to make my final comments, the teacher spoke once more and I felt like she took over the class because she was giving them all of the reminders I had planned to give them just at that moment. I felt disappointed but I didn’t let my feelings interfere and I let her speak and then made a comment complementing the reminders the teacher had just given them. And then the evaluator came in and took away the last 15 minutes of my class, the teacher had not warned me about this but by the look on her face I could tell that she didn’t know either. The teacher left the classroom and I took a minute to thank them for letting me be their trainee teacher for the day, they said thank you as well and I left.

This experience has helped me realize that teaching a language has it’s ups and downs, at least for my personality. The positive experience I had was actually helping students with their writing skills and knowing how to control my emotions and complete a class successfully. The negative experience I had was the feeling that I didn’t have a strong enough presence for the teacher to let me have full control of the class.

If I teach again I am glad that now I know how to plan and teach the different skills of a language, I wasn’t aware of all the details involved in language teaching, but now I feel I have the knowledge to do it, and that makes me feel glad.