So the past week, as you all know, has been full of presentations about myself, where I am from, and what are my likes and dislikes. Well I have now met all of my 12 classes and now 'so much fun, let's get to know Cha' time is over as I will begin to give actual lessons. So to remind everyone, the program I'm doing is through the Spanish ministry of education and our official title is auxiliar linguistica or language assistant. All the schools across Spain have different interpretations of this--from the blogs I've read and the posts on our facebook group, some schools use you very minimally while others practically leave you on your own. So I am the third language assistant at my school, Rosales 2, or in gallego, Rosais 2, and the way they have been doing it follows more along the latter. For each english class they have, they have something called desdoble. I don't quite understand the literal translation, but what happens is that every class, for example 1 ESO-B, is split into two groups. One half stays with the main teacher to go over grammar while the other half comes with me and the desdoble teacher who will sit in the back while I teach to make sure the class is under control. So basically whatever I plan is for the next two weeks since I see the same class every other week because of this desdoble business. It might be a bit confusing to understand, but basically the point I want to get across is that I have a lot of independence and liberty in this job as I have the whole class under my wing. I was unsure how to feel about this because we aren't supposed to do all the teaching and aren't getting paid to be teachers; we are paid to be assistants. But today, I found I really enjoyed the freedom. While their other teacher focuses on the more technical side like grammar with one half of the class, I get to work on their more practical skills like listening and conversing with the other half. The next week I will have the half that was with the teacher teaching grammar and help them with listening and conversing. I think I would find myself bored out of my mind if I just sat on the side as the teacher taught, and I was occasionally reeled in to help out.
I will not bore you with every class I had today, but I'll kind of highlight what I did with my 1 BAC-C (the 16 year olds) class. If you're having trouble understanding ESO v. BAC check out my description of the school system under culture! Anyways the book said today they were supposed to learn about what charity means and new vocabulary such as "lending a hand" and "support" through several listening exercises and after were to learn how to "express preferences and justify preferences'" through multiple choice exercises and speaking. So the teacher said since it's my first actual teaching day she would help me out and gave me questions that they could ask each other. Some of the questions are as follows: "Do you think that one day there will be no need for charities?" and "Are you satisfied with work charities do?" If you fell asleep already after the first question, then I'm right there with you. The teacher told me this was just a means of guidance, and I could choose to do otherwise so I said f*** the book, I'm going to do it my way. As I can easily recall my high school days since it wasn't too long ago that I graduated, I remember hating book exercises--they were so boring and felt very mechanical, and I've found that a professor can honestly change the way you think about a class; I've taken courses in college where I love the material but was stuck with a boring professor and found out that that in itself made it hard to listen in class so I decided to make my lesson plans as follows. As a warm-up I had an open discussion about what a charity is, what charities are apparent in Spain, and the types of volunteer works they've done. Not the funnest topic to teach, but something they had to review. As always, it can be hard to get a class to speak up so I started by showing them my ALS Ice Bucket Challenge video to which they all laughed which helped students relax and participate. The book then had a listening portion where they had to listen to some random voice on a radio player talk about some fake charity made up. Instead, I found a great video of Will Smith (who I found out they loved from my last session) and his wife talk about a charity very dear to their heart and what kind of work they have done with it. It was a 2 minute video which I played for them twice and had them answer four follow-up questions to see if they were able to comprehend the main idea of the video. After going over the answers, I replayed the video one more time and paused at where the answer was said so they could see why they may have missed it. The book then had the speaking portion on expressions and had multiple choice questions like "A person who chooses to be a homebody will a) -- b) --- etc." Again, if you fell asleep at the beginning of that statement then I'm right there with you. I decided it would be fun to play the "Would you rather game?" so I wrote on 20 strips of paper a would you rather question and had each student pick one, write what they chose, and justify their decision. I found out that one student would rather have a pet baby monkey over a pet baby penguin because they could train it to steal from other people. One student mentioned that they would rather know how they die versus when they die as to have the ability to avoid whatever it is that causes their death. Another student confidently told me they would rather speak their mind all the time then never be able to speak at all and that all the side comments would be whispered. The kids had so much fun with the questions, and the main purpose of the exercise was for them to express themselves and give a reason for why they feel a certain way. That indeed happened as several students had to defend their decision as their peers found the other a more suitable answer for themselves. The desdoble teacher told me after class how natural I was with the students and how creative my lesson plan was. I've always been the one to follow a book paragraph by paragraph, page by page. And now... I'm going off the books, and it seems to be working so far!
Yours truly,
TLT
I will not bore you with every class I had today, but I'll kind of highlight what I did with my 1 BAC-C (the 16 year olds) class. If you're having trouble understanding ESO v. BAC check out my description of the school system under culture! Anyways the book said today they were supposed to learn about what charity means and new vocabulary such as "lending a hand" and "support" through several listening exercises and after were to learn how to "express preferences and justify preferences'" through multiple choice exercises and speaking. So the teacher said since it's my first actual teaching day she would help me out and gave me questions that they could ask each other. Some of the questions are as follows: "Do you think that one day there will be no need for charities?" and "Are you satisfied with work charities do?" If you fell asleep already after the first question, then I'm right there with you. The teacher told me this was just a means of guidance, and I could choose to do otherwise so I said f*** the book, I'm going to do it my way. As I can easily recall my high school days since it wasn't too long ago that I graduated, I remember hating book exercises--they were so boring and felt very mechanical, and I've found that a professor can honestly change the way you think about a class; I've taken courses in college where I love the material but was stuck with a boring professor and found out that that in itself made it hard to listen in class so I decided to make my lesson plans as follows. As a warm-up I had an open discussion about what a charity is, what charities are apparent in Spain, and the types of volunteer works they've done. Not the funnest topic to teach, but something they had to review. As always, it can be hard to get a class to speak up so I started by showing them my ALS Ice Bucket Challenge video to which they all laughed which helped students relax and participate. The book then had a listening portion where they had to listen to some random voice on a radio player talk about some fake charity made up. Instead, I found a great video of Will Smith (who I found out they loved from my last session) and his wife talk about a charity very dear to their heart and what kind of work they have done with it. It was a 2 minute video which I played for them twice and had them answer four follow-up questions to see if they were able to comprehend the main idea of the video. After going over the answers, I replayed the video one more time and paused at where the answer was said so they could see why they may have missed it. The book then had the speaking portion on expressions and had multiple choice questions like "A person who chooses to be a homebody will a) -- b) --- etc." Again, if you fell asleep at the beginning of that statement then I'm right there with you. I decided it would be fun to play the "Would you rather game?" so I wrote on 20 strips of paper a would you rather question and had each student pick one, write what they chose, and justify their decision. I found out that one student would rather have a pet baby monkey over a pet baby penguin because they could train it to steal from other people. One student mentioned that they would rather know how they die versus when they die as to have the ability to avoid whatever it is that causes their death. Another student confidently told me they would rather speak their mind all the time then never be able to speak at all and that all the side comments would be whispered. The kids had so much fun with the questions, and the main purpose of the exercise was for them to express themselves and give a reason for why they feel a certain way. That indeed happened as several students had to defend their decision as their peers found the other a more suitable answer for themselves. The desdoble teacher told me after class how natural I was with the students and how creative my lesson plan was. I've always been the one to follow a book paragraph by paragraph, page by page. And now... I'm going off the books, and it seems to be working so far!
Yours truly,
TLT