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If you ask someone to teach a class containing a wide variety of ages, you might hear some complaints. As a person who started to go to school almost two years early than normal age, attended many language courses and studied languages with elder people and taught music and flute to classes containing a wide variety of ages, I want to write about the advantages of studying in a class containing a wide range of ages. When we think about teaching, we should always remember that as teachers we teach students to make them learn. I would like to mean that the most important element of the teaching process is learning I think. RumÎ said ‘No matter how much you know, you can only explain as much as the listeners can understand’. So the most important thing is not being comfortable when we teach for a group. For me the most important thing is being understandability as a teacher to contribute students’ learning. Teaching a class containing a wide variety of ages can be one of the most efficient teaching way. When I just teach for adults or young learners, I always feel that there is a lack. A difference. I do not only mean the age differency but also the perspective. Adults and young people have different experiences, different aims, different capabilities, different learning speed, different interests, etc. This list could be infinite. But what I want to tell is how important to have these differences to be creative and efficient on the way of teaching language. With providing the creativeness and the efficient way, You get the success of teaching, your students learn from you. Teaching a language means teaching a culture, teaching every single possibility in life. So it needs these differences. Adult learners might bring their experiences and real motivation, young learner might bring their energy and logical ways of fast learning to the classroom. They can help each other about sharing these essentials of learning. They might influence each other. At this point, the teacher should be aware of all differences and use these as beneficial as it can be used. In fact, it is like making a pros and cons list. When you see all the pluses and minuses, you can consider all the sides and facts about the situation. So after being aware of all these advantages of teaching classes containing a wide range of ages, the teacher also should get the disadvantages and try to solve or decrease their effects. As a conclusion, it is always so significant to understand and digest all the positive aspects of life and the things. Teaching and learning are necessary parts of life and we can not divide them. Then get all the negative sides and try to learn from them and create new advantages from the disadvantages. As a future English teacher and an old student, I will always try to be helpful as possible as I can. Maybe I don’t have a lot of English teaching experience but I know that I can find its positive way as I found the positive way of teaching classes containing a variety of ages. Thank you Mine Aksoy
