Experiences of a teacher of English

We teachers have to work fine and to teach our students to work fine too.  For example their notebooks, books and iPads have to be clean and neat. Discipline at working neatly is very educative, indeed.  As well we will teach them to think, to ponder, to meditate, to reason. And most of the topics and issues we teach are suitable for making our students think about them.  Even when talking to them we can leave blanks in our speech in order to make them think: silence can help think a lot – it pushes you to think and reason.  Most of our students are used to playing videogames too much maybe: let's also help them think about abstract topics, even more when they already are 10 years. When they’re 10 years, for instance they can understand syntactic and grammar concepts, when teaching a second or foreign language.  Before that age approximately we have to use visual aids for teaching a language: flashcards, posters, realia or real objects, ...

Teacher A said to teacher B, “Young children need visual aids, like posters, flash-cards, puzzles, plasticine, puppets, colors.  They cannot think of abstract grammar sentences and phrases.  If you use those aids, English is learned through images. I remember that once I was teaching kids of 6. The topic was flavors. I ordered the ladies of the dining-hall to prepare some salt, sugar, chocolate, orange, lemon.  The kids were eager to participate.  I was beginning my career then and classes were not very good anyway. The subject was about our daily surroundings, in English.  One kid had to close his eyes and let me know the flavor he had tasted. It was funny to see their faces when they tried sugar… or salt.” / Photo from: thejuicymamas com

Hi Charlie Sheen and everybody else, As a matter of fact something else could be said about this kid I referred to on post # 919. The point here is helping the kid realize he can actually work and do specific things in the classroom. This kid had problems at studies – even a possible Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (I stopped seeing him in class rather soon). What things did this kid aged 9 do in the classroom? The first premise is that all the class as long as it was, was only in English. So I had to rely a lot on the whiteboard, realia, gestures... to make me be understood by him. I remember one activity we used to do was TPR: Total Physical Response, assisted by my physical examples. For instance I told him, ‘Okay, Luis (invented name), now take this chair and put it at that corner’, and also I had to carry out the instruction before he understood. So as to finish, I would tell you, in the short period I taught him, he acquired some English, p...

One day English teacher A said to English teacher B, “Do you remember how important was to have visual aids when you were teaching at the former school? Visual aids can be very useful, yes sir. Even necessary sometimes. The English language enters children’s minds also through images and visual stuff. Now I can remember some examples you utilized, albeit some of them were time-consuming anyway. Think of role-plays (the restaurant thing...), think of revising past actions or last weekend things when you wanted to revise past simple as a warmer to the English class. Or when you assigned them as homework to cut off the pieces of food packages with the ingredients in different languages, or you might also think of the set of flash-cards, word-cards, or the poster of the parts of a house that colleague of yours lent you. Well, you had just the very chalkboard, where you used to draw so many things, and they liked the puppets, etc. Or as well the description of th...

One day teacher of English A said to teacher of English B, “Realia (real objects) for learning English? Pretty useful, I’d tell you. Try and use them sometimes. Now I remember two cases of my own. Last year, one day of February, one of my young students - 9 years – had to learn the word ‘swing’, ok? I was trying to explain to him the idea of something swinging. Soon, it happened I remembered the golf swing! Ok, I taught him how to swing, with an imaginary club. As well I brought something relaxing in the class. Kids that age simply need to move around and do actions. These latter ones make them learn words and phrases. We repeated the swing. I’ve got to say he learned swinging pretty well, in my opinion; he’s so smart a kid. He enjoyed the class and ‘swinging’ got stuck in mind. Amusing. Something else in short. One of those days I was teaching a class with adults, some sixty-something years. There happened to be a chess board and its pieces in the library where we used to have the cla...

One day teacher of English B said to teacher of English A, “A couple years ago I taught English to a small group: they were three. The youngest kid was 9 and the others were 13 and 12. At those ages that difference of years, as you know, is very big. The youngest one was smart, though had little English. I started to give him instructions, sometimes, at every class. Like ‘Go to the green door and open it... now close it,’ etc. I made gestures related to the actions, with my arms and hands. If I spoke to him in English he would understand little – actually some words were unknown to him - but he began to understand me, and other instructions given by his classmates. This young kid began to relate, to connect ‘that language’ – he knew it was English – with actions and the physical surroundings. Moreover I had got to have this kid move and stand up often: it was necessary for him to do that, at his age, and also because he had been doing homework and studying for rather a long while befor...