Failure is Success in Progress (Rachel)

 

I have been teaching a bit more now and I have taught a few lessons that have completely flopped. I feel okay about the flops because I can definitely see ways that I could improve them for next time. I am having difficulties with classroom management, especially in the school where the children have little motivation and are very loud. It is very different to teaching the adults I taught in the CELTA who were there because they wanted to learn.  This is definitely an area I need to work on and I hope with experience I can improve on it but right now I’m unsure of how. I think maybe the problem lies with my lack of rapport with the students. I’m not naturally sociable and as the lessons are mostly in Spanish I have found it difficult to contribute much to them or to create any rapport because I generally don’t have a clue what is going on until my name is called and I’m required to explain a word or phrase.  My mentor is still very supportive and I’m definitely getting a feel for what it would be like teaching full time and so far I’ve not been put off from a career in teaching.

Comments

  1. |Lucy|May 15, 2022 at 8:43 AM

    Thanks for writing this Rachel, always comforting to hear people's challenges as well as successes! I've had some 'floppy' lessons too where I'm not suure what has been learnt other than Lucy doesn't like it when you throw chairs and some people's drawings are better than others... (that was the worst one I'm describing - they're not all like that to be fair!) - I reckon it's just a matter of giving our 'teaching personas' time to progress, and also accepting that we don't have the home ground advantage here - if we had our class for a long time and knew them very well I think a lot of issues would be solved!

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