My Teaching

Each teacher can recount numerous highs and lows in their teaching career. Personally, July experienced many great moments while teaching. These were days when she ended so happy and enthusiastic that she knew she had selected the right profession.

During the time that July was at the university she could learn many things about how to teach English, but it was mainly theory, now what she needed to learn was the practical part, because she needed to face with this reality in order to get experience.

First July started teaching, she was passionate and loved her subject area, but she was clueless when it came to classroom management. Her teacher preparation program gave her no specific strategies, so she went into the classroom thinking that if she had a well-planned lesson, classroom management would take care of itself. Besides, she did not have the opportunity to observe classes to have an idea about what can she does when she have to face with problems like this.

Also, she was afraid; for example, that students seemed uninterested, too talkative, or even worse a blow up occurred and nothing got accomplished. That is why; she tried to find a variety of resources that help her in her classes, using a variety of materials.

Her first experience was with the English Semilleros Program through it she learned lot of about teaching and dealing with students. Besides; in this experience she found lot of materials and activities to show in class in order to get better understanding of the topics and at the same time motivate the students, because through the use of these materials the students can see real life situations, places, activities, and things in order to have a better understanding and a meaningful learning.

For example; she got visual materials like videos, images, flashcards, short stories; auditory such as conversations, dialogues. She though that these materials helped students to learn and with this they had different opportunities to acquire the language and the most important for her at that moment was to motivate them.

The first day in which July had to teach teachers was very afraid because she thought that those teachers had lot of experience teaching because they had specializations, master degrees, etc and July only was a student who was learning how to teach.

Besides; she felt like if those teachers looked at her weird because she had not experience teaching and they had lot of. She mentioned that day was really hard and she was very nervous that you could notice in her voice even she said that she began shaking and she was sure that the teachers realized that she was scare.

Actually; some of them told and ask questions to her like why are you scared? And July just laughs. However; the second class was different and July was confident about the things she knew, so she realized that those teachers did not know anything about English and she did; that was the way in which she got relax.

July had good memories teaching not only teacher but also teaching teenager in the semillero. But one of her favorites was one day she had to teach adverbs of frequency to the teachers.

She though that a good alternative to do that was through the use of a recipe in which the students had to say the steps to prepare sandwiches and at the same time they had to prepare it. The students brought the ingredients and they prepared each sandwiched for them.

She thought that that was a good strategy to teach that topic because some of those teachers were cooking teachers; so, that maybe was a meaningful learning for them. Finally, that day was memorable for July but also for the students who never forget that day.