FINAL REFLECTION:
After this last Workshop and this last Practice Period I feel so many things.
First I feel really satisfied. It was an intense but rewarding work and the results really please me. I feel students learnt with me and I was able to build a great rapport with them. I was so comfortable working with them that I could relax and deliver the class confidently.
Of course, these students were special, they were self-motivated, polite and nice people, eager to work hard and use the second language. Sometimes they were a little reluctant to read and write, preferring speaking or listening activities, but they almost never misbehaved. This helped me a lot with group and behaviour management and allowed me to concentrate more on other factors, like motivation and timing.
I also feel this experience helped me to understand my future jobs a bit more. I was a bit scared of adolescents, I thought I was not going to be able to cope with them or what to do with them. However, this experience allowed me to get to know teens and their different personalities and tastes, to know that with students who are between 13 and 17 you can teach much more than language, to know that with them to can generate discussions about a certain topic in English and even debates, that you can deal with topics such as the history of Rock and Roll or The Olympic Games through English and go beyond the limits of the language, bring to the class highly interesting things using the second language, work with values and controversial topics. With adolescentes you can never get bored, they always bring a new comment, a new idea, an original way of doing things. And you learn a lot from them, although some of them are rebellious or misbehave a lot, they teach you about the simple things in life, such as friendship or love and remind you of how important they are. I was able to understand all this thanks to the peer observations I did too.
Finally, I can say I feel there is a lot to be learnt yet. I know there is still a long way off, lots of things to be discovered, difficult situations inside a classroom to be faced, nice experiences to be remembered, tons of students to meet and diverse groups to work with. But for now I can say that after this experience I am more prepared to face all that. I feel I can stand in front of a group and be ready to keep on learning. In fact teaching is a profession in which you never stop discovering and getting to know new things, so you have to be always open minded.
This month and a half, during which I delivered 28 pedagogical periods and observed some other classes, will be always in my mind and my heart, as a memorable, profitable and valuable experience that taught me to try to be better in what I want to do the rest of my life.
