So the last few weeks of my course were very very hectic. I already wrote about my first teaching practice and after that I had 5 more. We had to prepare a lesson plan, worksheet, and a verbal learning activity for each practice so it was a lot of work. I felt like I was living at school because there was more than one occasion where I was there from 9am until 7pm. It was pretty exhausting but very much needed because by the end of the 6 practices I felt a lot more confident in preparing a lesson and also teaching a lesson. One of the teaching practices was at a nursing college. After the lesson our graders had our students write comments that they (the graders) translated for us during our debriefing session. It was really awesome to hear all of the comments and it was so culturally different from the kinds of comments you would hear in the states. Most of the comments for the girl teachers were “Teacher was so beautiful, so lovely looking, so cute” etc. They also said things like “Teacher was so kind, so nice, I really liked this lesson...I hope the teacher comes back to teach again”. Everything was so sweet! If they did have anything negative to say they would blame themselves. One of the comments for someone in my class was “teacher was hard to understand but he is very handsome...or teacher was hard to understand but I don’t know a lot of English”. They would follow any slightly negative comment with a compliment and they also blame themselves if they couldn’t understand the lesson or the teacher! To me that was so interesting because I have never once said “My teacher is so beautiful” in an evaluation. Haha that makes me laugh just thinking about saying something like that to one of my old professors.
My last teaching practice was Kindergarten. Im not going to lie, I was actually pretty scared for this practice. Kids scare me a little bit in general and these kids are so cute so I knew that if they were being naughty there was no way I was going to be able to discipline them. I envisioned 30- 5 year olds wrecking havoc and me just standing by laughing and thinking it was cute. During the morning assembly, Ying (one of our instructors) announced who was teaching each class. When she said Kindergarten and then “Teacher Megan” all the kids stood up in a line, walked toward me, and their ‘leader’ took my hand and lead me to their classroom. My heart melted when the little girl grabbed my hand! It was so cute! Surprisingly, the class went really well. The kids were so well behaved! I was teaching them 6 new vocabulary words and there was only one out of control thing that happened. I did this activity where we got in a line and ‘choo-choo trained’ around the room. I had them stop at a vocab word that I had taped to the floor and they were supposed to say the word. Trying to get 30 kindergarten kids to all gather around a picture on the floor was a little bit of a disaster. They ended up like piling on top of each other over the word. So then, most of the kids couldn’t even see it, and there were little tykes getting squished at the bottom of the pile! Of course this happened right when Ying came into the room to observe. Their teacher was in the room so she helped me diffuse the situation and I decided to try out a different game. Other than that little mishap the kids were so cute and it was really really fun to teach them! At the end of the lesson their teacher said to me, “the children really want to touch your hands”. I said “ok” and she said something in Thai and I was bombarded with kids grabbing my hands and arms! I started giving them ‘high fives’ and the LOVED that. So overall kindergarten was a success!
No comments:
Post a Comment