Sixth week! Everything is going fine. I just want to say "Give me one more week!" I wish I can spend more time with my girls. I have already taught them more than one month, in the first two or three weeks, to be honest, I felt nervous before I went into the classroom, almost every class. I felt it was a task for me. Compared to that, now I'm kind of looking forward to teaching them, I started to enjoy my teaching here.
In the third week, our school had a retirement party for one of the teachers. Girls performed a lot during the concert. They sang songs, danced, even prepared a small drama, and also the impressive speech. I still remembered one sentence that the girl said "A good teacher is not teaching from the book, she/he is teaching from the heart" (to all of my fellows). I felt sooo lucky that I got the chance to attend the activity like this. We are just slowly into Assunta's life.
Our school's AV room is very nice. It helps me a lot in my teaching. Their teachers do not bring them there frequently. So girls were all excited when I taught them there. They like funny videos and colourful power points. Maybe all of them are girls, it is easy to cheer them up by only using some beautiful photos. I found that they will concentrate morein the AV room than the normal classroom. One time I showed them a video at the end of the class, the most popular Korean song "Gangnam Style"'s MV to them, it was a reward, all of them did well in the class. The girls were like on the top of the world. Some of them even stood up and started to dance. Besides the videos and songs, I tried so many ways to attract their attention. Like using word cards. One of my lessons before was about 'how to write a short story'. There were five basic elements of a story. I prepared 8 colorful word cards and pasted them all on the whiteboard, and asked girls to pick up five from them. And the class control is more and more easy for me.
Here is a new problem I faced. Students do not like to do their homeworks, and cannot submit their exercise books or essay books on time. No matter how many times you mentioned in the class, some of them will just forget and ignore you. Other teachers in my office said you just scold them! But I cannot scold them like the other teachers did. I myself am still a student, I understand their thoughts and feelings. My friends, tell me the way how you deal with these kind of things please. Share with me your strategies.
Form 2's final exam will start this Friday, all of my observations are completed. I can relax myself a little bit. I hope I can get a chance to observe my friends' school. Good luck to all of you.
Good night Dr. Adelina and my fellow friends.
Have you tried rewarding for completed homework? Or removing the fun things IF they dont finish their work and submit to you?
ReplyDeleteHave you tried setting a more achievable goal? less no of words for an essay? perhaps, try asking them to write a paragraph first instead of long essays.
Perhaps, also let them read a text with less no of questions to answer. GEt them to answer in griups? First group to hand in shall get to do as they please? will get best group award? (you can make these awards out of paper and let each member of the group wear the 'medals' throughout your lesson?
Other ideas?
Pls also read what your friends are doing with their students. I think they have some strategies that you can use. Remember to scaffold these students gradually and not to give tasks which are too challenging, okay? G'luck!
Thank you for giving me so many advices. I will try~
DeleteWang Yi, I envy how you can use your school's AV room and conduct lessons there. I am so glad to hear that the students love what you did with them, because although most of them are very resourceful and they have good proficiency, they will still enjoy creative and fun lessons because that is not what they usually have in class. From my experience, when teachers do something different and fun, even the most passive students can't help but to pay attention and show their interest in it! The feeling of satisfaction when you see students so genuinely interested in the activities you prepared is worth all the hard work, always :)
ReplyDeleteAs for your problem, I faced the similar issue too. Many students do not hand in their work and some of them think that they are too good or the exercises are too easy for them. At first, I gave students the flexibility to hand in their work later than the scheduled time but it got worse. Many of them do not bother to hand in their work anymore. I admit that I was not very firm with them and that perhaps, was my biggest mistake as I gave them the freedom because I do not want to force them.
I also read from our peers' reflection and some of them already told the students the rules on the very first day - which I did not. I do not know how effective this method is but I guess it is crucial to let the students know what you expect of them and what they should expect you to do when they don't follow instructions. But remember that there is always exception with special case, as some students may really have problems struggling with their assignment. Then, it is up to the teacher to find out what is really the student's prob and help him/her and make sure they hand in their work on time in the future.