April 3rd, 2014
This week, students did some exercises about simple
past tense. They have been studying it for the past few weeks. They need to do
more exercises about the topic. Our mentor teacher took a lot of time for
various activities just to make sure that students internalize the topics.
There were 3-5 kinds of activities which are linked to each other. It was a
good idea because they can make connections and learn easily. In the exercises,
they need to fill in the blanks with past form of verbs. In the second
activity, they were supposed to answer wh- questions forms of simple past tense
with long answers. Third activity was about negative forms. About giving long
answers, I think it is boring and unnecessary because it is not natural. Since
all the activities are mechanic, I didn’t quite like the idea of teaching
English in this way. Considering they are young learners and they need input as
much as possible, I think that’s why they use these forms. When I was a
student, I also have been through the same process. However, in secondary
school, the activities are much more communicative. Since they standardized the
lesson plans in METU College and these kinds of activities are applied to all
of the classes, I think they included such mechanic activities on purpose
because the students need to learn standard use of English first. After primary
school, they won’t force students to use long forms, I hope. Also, they did
info gap activity and they put the sentences into correct order to make a
story. It was two-hour class and they finished all the activities in such a
short time. It can because of the class size, but most importantly, it is
because the students are motivated all the time. By the way, in the third
activity, our mentor asked us whether we would like to continue the class. I
got on the stage first and introduced myself. She said to the student that they
can ask questions to me if they want. The first thing they asked was my age. I
think it is quite common for students to ask such questions. The way they think
is really innocent and lovely. When they were giving answers, I type them on
the computer so that everyone can see. İdil said "Finally, there is
someone who can type faster than you do." This made me laugh because they
looked so surprised. In the other class, we also conducted some of the activities
and it was really good to interact with them since we will do our first
teaching next week. We always sit at the back of classroom and we don't usually
see their faces. Neither do they. They were curious about us. Sometimes, we
catch them look at us without being noticed; but, we notice because that's what
we do; to observe.
Another point is that I still learn new things from my
mentor teacher. I sometimes realize I have never thought about that specific
word whether I use it correctly or not. For example, one of students said “My
answer is true.” and she said “It is correct. We don’t use true in such
situations…” Then, it struck me and I asked myself “Did I know this before?”
This happens a lot to me when I am observing the class, which is very good for
me.
Finally, there are some extrovert students in the class,
namely Mehmet, Lara and Elif. They don’t participate much and it takes so
much time for them to complete the assigned tasks. At the first weeks of my
school-visits, our mentor teacher didn’t force them to speak. She kinda ignored
their lack of participation. It bothered me a lot because our duty is to
motivate them and engaging them into class. This week, she addressed them by
their names and said "You didn’t say anything today." This also
bothered me. I don’t know a way to incorporate them into class but neither
ignoring them nor addressing them overtly is a good idea. Maybe, our mentor is
also confused and she was trying different solutions, I don’t know for sure.
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