Reflection 3

The whole idea of practicum worried me at the beginning. My feelings were stuck at nervousness. I didn't feel like I was ready to teach and I thought that preparing for lessons will take lots of time which might affect my grades. There are a couple of reasons that erased this feeling of nervousness. The main one is the teacher who is in charge of our group. He is such an understanding teacher, he didn't ask for complicated activities, nor was he a very demanding person. Which made my and my classmate's experience much more enjoyable and comfortable. But the moment I stood in front of the class and introduced myself as an English teacher I felt like really getting my confidence back.

At first, I thought that the difference between the students' generation and mine would be a bit troublesome, but when I started to interact more with students everything started to get easier and I started to understand them better.

In one of my lessons, I taught a text called "Soccer or Football", and when I asked the students about their favorite team, one of them said that he loves the Argentine team because they play with their enemy as if they were in a circus. the moment I heard that I was stunted and so impressed at the same time, I never expected this from a 7th-grade student. I discussed this with my teacher after the class ended and he told me that this student is one of the quietest yet the smartest in the class, and I replied that he is like a little Einstein.

One of the challenging obstacles I faced during this practicum is seeing a big number of students who don't interact enough in class, which made me think that it might be hard to pass the material to all the students equally. A solution I found for this problem is to teach the lesson in different ways or use different tools so that I can gain all of the different students’ attention. Eventually, now I'm able to know each student's strong and weak points, and I remember most of the students' names even though I teach lots of classes, which made the process of teaching much easier for me.

Another obstacle I encountered during this semester was the large number of students talking to each other in class. In most of the lessons, especially in the first lesson, I could hardly control the class. To stand in the middle to describe and say calm down or to personally ask each student to keep it quiet works sometimes but not always. Honestly, I did not know the solution to this problem until the fourth week of the practicum. I felt that the students no longer spoke as much as before. After a while, I realized the reason, which is that the students no longer saw me as a student at Al Qasimi College, but rather began to respect me and my colleague as English language teachers.