CO #1 Jude

On Monday, I had my first classroom observation (which is kind of ironic, considering I had six weeks to observe a class and I chose the last week to cram all three in one day). In some ways, I think it was an intelligent decision to do all three in one day, in another way, I seriously regret waiting until the last week to complete the Classroom observation assignment, because there were a lot of helpful things the CIES teachers did that I wish I had learned to do earlier.

My first class came at 9am, and it was a group 1 grammar class taught by Sana Mcharek. Sana is a very strong woman with very good control over her classroom Judging from the composition, she had students from Asia, two students from Africa who spoke French, students from Spain, and five students from the Middle East who spoke Arabic. One thing that I didn't even take into account is that students who are from extremely different cultural backgrounds all have extremely different ideas of classroom etiquette. For example, the students from the Middle East tended not to raise their hands and just spoke out in a conversational tone, while students from Asian countries tended to be much quieter and more observational.

Sana, however, seemed to be an expert at classroom control, and started the lesson out deductively by explaining the importance of the present progressive tense, and then writing sample sentences on the board. I really appreciated the teaching of this, because the present progressive is proven to be the first tense that students of any language tend to learn, and she was making the difficult concept abundantly clear. Sana then handed out different worksheets for students to work on in the class, and I had the opportunity to work with a student from the Ivory Coast named Ingrid.

The worksheet asked students to describe taking an American friend to their home countries and deciding the different activities that they would do. Like what we learned from the TeFl class, this activity turned out to be a great success. Every student loved sharing their idea of the perfect day with the class, and the use of the present progressive helped them describe their activities. I could tell that Ingrid is usually on the shyer side, but when it came to describing what we would do in the Ivory Coast, she was more than willing to talk about going to the beach and going to the shops and museums.

The worksheet wasn't finished, but it was assigned as homework, which I thought was a really great decision. Overall, I found Sana to be a teacher who was devoted to her students and also demanded respect, two qualities that I hope to have if I become a teacher at her level. Afterwards, she let me borrow some of her worksheets, and I look forward to using her lesson plans in my future teaching English in Korea!