My last class at Advanced English I!!!!

If a doctor, lawyer, or dentist had 40 people in his office at one time, all of whom had different needs, and some of whom didn't want to be there and were causing trouble, and the doctor, lawyer, or dentist, without assistance, had to treat them all with professional excellence for nine months, then he might have some conception of the classroom teacher's job. ~Donald D.

My last class was really interesting because the students were studying discoveries and inventions. It helped me a lot to remember some discoveries I studied when I took this subject. In other words, I learned more about it in order to teach it to the students!

The part of the lesson that went very well was a short debate I developed at the end of my class. I divided the class into two groups and I gave each group an invention or discovery. They had to say the advantages and whatever information to prove that the invention/discovery they had was better than the one the opposite group had. They also said the disadvantages of the opposite group´s topic. Some of the shy students were participating, but not all of them!! I did not want to push them to participate because they had done a great job in other activities.

The part of the class that did not go so well was the warm-up activity because I had some problems establishing the rules of the game.

In the grammar phase, as always, the students were participating asking questions and giving examples. I presented the structure (past perfect tense) and almost all the work was done by the students. I just gave them some examples and then I gave them the beginning of sentences and they began adding ideas to complete it (orally).
Some examples of the prompts I gave are:
I did not have any money because...
Students´answers:
I had spent too much.
I had lost it.
I hadn´t worked.

They felt bad about selling the house because....
They had spent a lot of money on it.
They had lived there for a long time.
It works very well for advanced students!

Unfortunately, I had problems with the time I was going to give to each activity. I could not develop the final activity I had in my plan. My tutor teacher told me that this is the challenge I have in almost every class. I have noticed that I spend too much time when I am developing speaking activities, but it happens because I like when students are motivated to participate that is why I prefer that they continue speaking instead of stopping the activity when I know that what they are sharing is really important to reach my objective, and at the same time they are improving in different skills.

If I teach that lesson again or whatever other class I will try to be careful with the time I spend in the activities because as one of my classmates says, we have to distribute time according to the level of difficulty the activities have!

I learned a lot from this group and I liked to work with them because as I have said in other journal entries, they are a good group of students that like to participate and they give really nice ideas!
I also learned many things from my tutor teacher. He shared some ideas with me in order to help me develop my classes. He showed me how to turn a boring activity into something interesting for the students. He has a great ability to make students participate.

I would work with this group without thinking twice!!