Teacher’s diaries

Photo de Max Fischer provenant de Pexels

From time to time, I just want to quit my job to embark on a new journey within a new career. I feel exhausted and drained because of all this work on my shoulders. Working with students is hard, the degree of hardship may vary depending on the level of students, their age, their cultural background and their interests.

When I was assigned the three levels I will be working with, I felt enthusiastic for this new opportunity: new city, new school, new faces. But I felt kind of discouraged because I had no idea what to do especially things were changing due to Covid 19 pandemic.

Teaching under such circumstances was and still such a challenge to tackle, everyone was (is) trying to adapt to new changes covid 19 forced us to undergo; teaching-learning online, quarantine, remote work mode, social distancing …ect. Therefore, I am always trying to do the best as I can as a teacher for my students. I always try to create the right atmosphere for the learning experience so students would be comfortable and feel safe to participate and get involved in the classroom. It might not be always the case, especially if you have some introvert students who just might not want to let you in and get closer to them, my only advice to you is “there is always a way” trust your teacher’s gut!

Story time:

 After a million times of changing and editing the timetable, I finally settled with the classes I will be working with for this year. Each class is unique and the students’ personalities were different. A common core class was my favorite (ops guilty! I know) students were polite and enthusiastic to learn and participate, they interacted positively with the atmosphere I tried to establish and adapted quickly to my way of teaching and breaking down any lesson. The experience was a smooth ride until I noticed 4 students that sat at the back, did not have the will or the power to participate. It felt like as if they were forced to come to my class. After some reflection I decided to step up and try to get them involved!

First thing was to nominate them whenever we wanted to correct an exercise, they had all the answers right! So, what is the problem? Usually, students who have difficulties to acquire a new language are the one who do not like to speak outside their comfort zone. On the contrary mine were able to interact with the lessons, yet the issue was still unknown to me for some reason.

I sat down for some reflection on the situation, I thought about different strategies that maybe will incite them to step out and speak, eventually I decided to try to arouse their motivation by assigning activities and building exercises and tasks upon their interests.

In order to execute my plan, I assigned a writing activity: what do you do in your free time?

The objective of this activity was for students to practice the use of the simple present, at the same time I wanted to make use of their productions and investigate a little more about their interests, which will allow me next to revive my classroom atmosphere.

Students’ papers analysis:

photo credits to pexels.com

I found out that the majority of my “shy” students loved reading Manga, watching Anime an even trying to learn a new language (Japanese) because of the huge influence they are being confronted with (Korean pop start/ drama….)

The “shy” students prefer mainly to read or watch to learn something new. My challenge was to create meaningful interesting resources for my students to enjoy while learning from. Luckily I know exactly what to do since I was an otaku myself back in the days in addition to learning Japanese language for two years at college.

First thing was positive reinforcement, I had to think outside of the box, instead of just using words, I created a reward system:

Whenever a student provides the right answer or participate positively, I give them one sticker themed with a Manga/ Anime character. Slowly but surely, students were enthusiastic to participate in order to get that one sticker or even more, the trick was to increase STT and minimize the TTT, IT WORKED!

Secondly, I tried to integrate some manga/ anime characters’ name in practice exercises to trigger their drive to answer.

I even assigned a mini project about their favorite manga/ anime, the objective was to practice the simple present/ present continuous and the theme of the unit which we were studying at that time (artistic interests).

The idea here is to catch that one element/ hint that will help you take your classes to next level! Students are human being with interests that trigger their enthusiasm to learn and discover new things, the teacher’s job is to know how to drive the message home.

N.B: each class is unique and every teacher is the scientist of his/her own classroom. I am just sharing my ideas and thoughts that worked or did not work. It all serve for better teaching/learning experience.