I have to
tell you that even though I had the opportunity to give classes the last
period, I always feel kind of nervous before to start a class. This time I am
with the group of Basic English. They are a large group like many of the groups
in which you are teaching right now. At the beginning, I felt really happy to know
I was going to have my practice with them. I thought it was going to be easier
to work with them, but let me tell you that I was wrong… the topics can be simple,
the vocabulary can be basic, and I can continue with the “easy things” but it´s
not the point. Now I know that every group has its difficulties. By working
with this group you have to be really careful at the time to develop the class
because they are going to take you as their model. Teachers of Basic English are
those that form the basis of these students. That´s what I was thinking before
the class. Then the teacher asked me to
start the class and I got more nervous because most of the students were not in
the classroom and I needed two groups in order to develop the warm up activity so
I tried to wait for some of them. I presented myself and asked them some
questions giving them time to arrive before the warm up activity. Then I
started with the warm up because most of them were in the classroom after the
short presentation. After it, I felt more confident. The last class the teacher
had introduced part of the topic so I had to continue with it. To start I gave a short explanation
about the topic and then I wrote some key terms on the board. Then I asked them to
give some examples in order to check if they had understood how to use them. At
the end of this short review, I asked them to work in the first appendix, but
to my surprise some of them had already done it because they get the copies of
all the appendixes since the beginning of the unit. What I did in the moment
was asking them to wait for their classmates who had not finished it yet. Also
during that moment I took advantage and checked the exercises in which they
had doubts. At the end, I can say that I
really enjoyed to work with this group and even though I continue making some mistakes,
I have learned a lot from every one of the experiences I have passed through
during this practice.
