A quick recap about my 2nd reflection:
I was asked to teach 4 Batai, a very rumbustious class with problematic attitude. Although they are high in English proficiency, but they're lack in both speaking and presentation skills. So, how did I handle the kids?
I can say that I was quite stern with these kids. I thought that if I was nice to them, they would not take me seriously. I set a few ground rules where the students needed to follow strictly. In my opinion, the rules are important as they will give your students a hint on your teaching style and how they should behave when the teaching & learning (T&L) is conducted. A few students revealed to me that when I came into the class with these ground rules, instantly they knew that "I'm the type of teacher who you don't want to mess with".
My dad gave me a tip, told me to use reverse psychology to deal with this kind of kids. There was once when I entered the classroom where the students did not greet me & were still playing around in the classroom, completely ignoring my presence. Instead of scolding them, I lectured them about "good manners & courtesies" for good. After that day, whenever the students met me inside or outside the classroom, they would always greet me. They started to show more respect and behave better in the class.
My sternness towards the students gradually changed as I saw that they had started to improve a lot in their behaviour and attitude to learn. Since 4 Batai consists of a bunch of talkative students, I had decided to do more speaking activities with them. Most of them admitted that they were very shy to speak in front of the class. I recalled the first time that I observed the class was when Pn. Emily did an oral presentation with them and to my horror, they were very weak in presentation skill. Most of them didn't greet the audience, did not even introduce themselves or their topic and worst, some of them didn't end their speech with a "thank you"! Afterwards, whenever they were asked to do presentation, I would encourage all of the group members to speak & assist them by giving them feedbacks or comments. I would also give them a few suggestion on how to improve or make their presentation be more interesting/lively at the end of the lesson. From zero to hero - I must say that I am very proud of 4 Batai as they showed a very impressive improvement in both speaking & presentation skills (and they did it in quite a short time, how amazing is that!). In Week 4, they were bolder and became more eloquent to speak in public.
Practice makes perfect!
When I revealed to the students that I would do revision on literature with them, they frankly confessed that learning literature is boring. To overcome this problem, I designed fun yet challenging tasks for my students. My goal was that the students would learn from the literature and love it as much as I do. I used game (i.e. puzzle), role-play and mind-mapping as well as asked the students to create/interpret the poem that they had learned into something else (i.e. poster, story-telling, song, etc.). One of my favourite activities that I did with the class was when I did revision on "The Fruitcake Special". I asked them to put themselves in a chemist's shoe and create a suitable perfume for the characters in the short story based on their characteristics. The end products were marvellous! The students were very creative and they really enjoyed inventing the perfumes. A few groups took the initiative to pretend as the promoters for the newly invented perfume as they tried to persuade and sell the perfume to their audience. On the last day of my teaching practices, I was glad to hear that my students enjoyed my literature class the most & would miss me teaching literature as I managed to make the class became more interesting & fun.
The perfumes that the students had invented.
The Pizza Perfume a.k.a. Victoria Pizza 2.0:
Buy one, get one FREE pizza coupon courtesy of Armstrong's Peachy Pizza.
I found that using mind-map is very useful during the T&L in the classroom. I often used mind-map to deliver my lessons as well as asked my students to draw mind-maps for their presentations. Not only that it is effective (students understand better on the topic that you teach), the students also enjoyed making their own mind-map as creative as possible.
The making of mind-maps...
The final products...
Apart from that, the students seemed to love group work more than individual task. It was proved from time to time that whenever I asked them to do group discussion, they were very enthusiastic to complete the task given. However, when I asked them to do individual work, they took longer time to complete it.
We love group works! :)
Another problem that I had encountered while teaching was pronunciation problem. I had lisp, so sometimes I have difficulties to pronounce certain words properly. There were a few times that I'd been laughed by my students whenever I mispronounced English words. Most of the times, I was aware of the mistakes and quickly pronounced the words again to correct myself. Each time before I entered the class, I would go through my teaching materials and referred to the dictionary in order to know the correct pronunciation of the words that I'm not familiar with. At the end of my third observation by my mentor, I was glad when she told that I've improved in my pronunciation.
Other than that, during the first couple weeks of my teaching practices, Pn. Emily told me to finish up their individual oral presentation. I was in a dilemma at that time and approached my mentor (Pn. Farahnaz) for advice as I did not know whether I should carry on with the task since my time to teach the class was very limited as the final exam was just around the corner. In the end (during Week 4), my mentor told me that I didn't have to proceed with the individual presentation and just focus on my teaching practices as it was not part of my responsibility to complete the task. I was relieved as I was afraid that I might not have enough time to do revision on literature as well as teach them other topics if I needed to continue with the students' oral presentation.
The experience that I went through with 4 Batai is a bittersweet one. I admit that at first, I was a bit reluctant to teach the class. But eventually, I started to enjoy teaching them and proud with the improvements that they had done throughout my teaching practices in SMKDJ. Somehow, they reminded me of myself when I was still schooling. I'm glad that I took the challenge to take over the 'nightmare' class because I definitely had learned a lot by teaching these kids. Personally, I rather teach a bunch of hyperactive kids (like the students in 4 Batai) rather than the passive ones. If I were given the chance to come back to that school again, I would like to continue to teach them as I feel like there are so much more that I would love to teach, do and explore with the kids. To see how eager and enthusiastic they were to participate in the learning & activities that I had provided for them as well as the improvements that they had done were utterly fulfilling. In the end, all the sweats, headaches and heartaches were paid off when I heard them said "You're one of the best teachers that we ever had."
"Experience is the teacher of all things." - Julius Caesar -
No comments:
Post a Comment