first class experience, advance I

July 25^th , 2013

I had my first teaching experience on Thursday afternoon; it was with students that are in the advanced level I. Let me tell you that this time I got less nervous than the first time because I already got some experience related teaching, so I could control myself better. First, I started with a review of the last class they had and after that, I developed the warm up activity I had chosen. For the warm up activity, I had prepared a song; at first, I asked them to read it and underlined all the infinitive phrases they found and after that, my intention was to play the song, made them sing it and checked what they had underlined. Regarding the activity, not everything was the way I thought because I faced a situation I did expect. I choose a song called “I want to break free”, and at the moment I had to play that song, the teacher told me that I could not play the song because the university did not allow us to play that kind of music.  At the moment, I got paralyzed because I did not know how to react about that, and I explained him that I did not know about it. So I had to improve in front of students, I told them that the computer did work and because of that I had to read the song while they had to tell me the infinitives phrases they found. Well, I can say it was really meaningful for me because I consider that there are many things which are not written in books, so you did not learn until you experiment situations like mine. I felt kind of sad because the class was not the way I planned to be, but I think that everybody knows it is part of new experiences. Now, I have learned that when given a class you have to pay attention to diferent details and settings where your class is going to take place. After all, I just worked with some exercises about gerunds and infinitives on the students’ book, and it was what I did in my first class.