last few days.......................

Fifth Day implementing Unit didactica.

 

Last Thursday implementing my lesson: it was surrealist, all these youngsters excited because it was raining and opening the enormous windows to touch the hailstones falling along with the rain. I was given the explanation that rain disturbs students and children and affects their behaviour ( same lame excuse was given to me at the school were I worked since early in the morning I had second graders for arts and crafts in English, and this group has some discipline issues going on …..)  Coming from a tropical and very green land such as my country rain is just nature’s way of feeding the soil and cleaning the air and it happens quite often and in fact there is a region called Buenaventura which holds second place after India in terms of rainfall rate percentage.

 

Any way let me continue with my description of what was the lesson like. As I was calling registrar ( list ) and insisting they at least responded present, one of them tells me to look behind the the teacher’s desk , meaning the wall : they have regaled all the teachers with a mural painting depicting a  giant penis, I didn’t give any importance to it since it was made to shock ( very mediocre and over used way of shocking , indeed), but I wanted the tutor to take a photographic record of it since I need to take pictures of my practicum , and sure enough , this is part of my practicum , too!. So she did saying that she usually does take good pictures…………….Thanks.

This particular day I had to teach reported speech and did as closure of this particular lesson an evaluating activity disguised as an exercise at the end of the lesson. It was to choose the correct form of the verb tenses according to the sentence and situation described.

I kept reminding them that they had to finish it on time but with 4B group everything becomes harder , so different it is from the group of fourth graders C that I have right after this class. It is an small group and their behaviour is so different, so you can have a better performance within the group and implement event ludic activities to promote speaking as it happens with this group, I am not saying that I have to use some percentage of my time to quiet them down but the attitude they have benefits them and therefore they gain. The lesson can flow and it is not like a bumpy road.

And again “ no discipline no learning “ and by discipline I mean everything from respect to the teacher, to keeping a silent attitude when explanations are delivered or dealt with, to effort at completing the task, studying or setting up sometime to study….and the list could go on.  But unless something is done regarding the respect due to the teacher figure, the attitude of parents regarding education, educating in the discipline of respect and effort, giving each one their place: parents educating at home not delegating this responsibility to the school and the teachers, the educators recuperating their rightful place within this society, we can prepare ourselves to face another informe Pisa with the same results we just had.

 

Regarding the lesson itself I tried to make it as easy as possible given the level of students, so I designed a chart where in one column we had direct speech and on the other reported speech. As I handed the exercise as a form to evaluate I still have to check on the results from this activity.

Other part of the lesson consisted in matching headlines to pictures about a ghost story , this activity I found most tiring with this group , so when I did it for the other group