Week 2/4

Another week of teaching has come to an end and I am looking forward to a lay in tomorrow! As much as I am enjoying teaching and this entire experience, getting up at 5:30 isn’t the best! Last week, I taught activities but not entire lessons. This week I started teaching full lessons. On Monday, I had my first lesson which also happened to be my observed one. It was a 4ESO Oral English class who had requested a lesson on Mamma Mia. This was a challenging lesson to plan as it was so broad and my mentor gave me all the freedom to do whatever I wanted. I wanted to create a fun lesson that they actually enjoyed as well as learning something. It worked out pretty well in the end and the students enjoyed the lesson.

The observed lesson wasn’t nearly as scary as I was expecting. The teacher just sat at the back and let me get on with it. Afterwards, she told me it was well structured and fun for the students so the positive feedback was encouraging. For the rest of this week, I have taught the Mamma Mia lesson to several other classes and continued teaching small activities within the lessons. I also taught a vocabulary lesson with my 4ESO classes which was good. I taught it three times in a row yesterday, so by the third lesson I had perfected the instructions and explanations😂.

I enjoy lesson planning but I tend to spend WAY too long planning every little detail making sure it’s perfect. I’ve taught several lessons this week, repeating them with 3-4 classes meaning I had fewer lessons to plan overall. I think I need to work on planning a little faster and not getting bogged down in the details, so when I’m given more and more lessons I’ll be able to keep on top of them. 

*Side note (a very random one!): 
A few cultural differences I’ve picked up on:
- People don’t smile at each other. Back home, if you make eye contact with someone it’s automatic to smile but here it is met with a evil eyed glare as if to say ‘why are you smiling?’ 
- Having not previously spent a prolonged amount of time abroad until now I really am starting to notice (and miss) British manners. For example, I've had it happen numerous times where two people are walking along next to each other on the pavement coming towards you. The natural reaction for me would be to move to one side. But this doesn’t seem to cross their mind with them either expecting you to walk in the road or they just barge past you (literally!). 

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