Today we were transferred to another school. This new school is an all-girls Catholic school. There was a lot of anxiety going into the school as Tim (another teacher candidate) and I are two young male teacher candidates and didn’t know what to expect from a school with all girls (and only 4-5 male teachers). Despite our anxieties, we just went with the flow and everything turned out alright. This school had a class system that I’ve never seen before. In all the schools that I’ve been in in Canada, the teachers have their own classroom(s) and students go to the appropriate classes. In Technologico de Monterrey both teachers and students move from classroom to classroom depending on what was scheduled for their classes (just like in university). At this girls’ Catholic School, the students stay in their classroom (except for certain subjects) and the teachers goes around to different classrooms based on the subjects they teach. I think it is an interesting concept, however, it means that there is a certain amount of time where the classrooms have no teacher, which opens up the opportunity for the students to cause trouble.
In the classes we attended today, we were less observer and more teacher. Since there was an English teacher that was absent, we acted as her substitutes. For one class they just had to use vocabulary words in sentences to show their understanding. We revamped the lesson by encouraging drawing pictures or a comic, writing paragraphs or a short story.
The next class compared and contrasted “The Outsiders” movie and novel. We used a think-pair-share style of discussion, this seemed to work very well, because the girls really like to talk in class, and the think-pair-share allows for a lot of talking.
The last class that we were in had the teacher present in class. She had asked us before the class to create an activity for the students to do a review of the their course content. Even though we ourselves are not English teachers, so we didn’t know exactly the technical things, the activity was good enough that the teacher wanted to keep so that she could use it for another one of her classes. This game starts by having the teacher(s) draw two pre-made slips of paper, one with a basic English sentence another with the tense that students had to transpose the sentence into. The students, who were already split into teams, would discuss the answers and send a representative racing to the front to write it on the board. The first team to write the correct answer would get a point for their team. The girls got very engaged with the game and were super competitive.
What today taught me was thinking quickly on your feet as a substitute teacher. During my practicum I had filled in occasionally for my SAs, but those were in my teachable subjects. This taught me to think quickly and improvise in a subject that is not in my teachable areas.