Teach English in Qingshan Zhen - Weihai Shi

Working as a teacher and a native speaker over the past couple of months has taught me many things. Most importantly, it has taught me how to discover my own teaching style. It happened by adapting to every individual student in each class and by transferring some learning techniques I used to use as a student. In this essay I will describe my first day as a teacher, I will explain how I managed to find my teaching techniques and how I transferred some of my personal characteristics into the classroom. On my first day of class tutorials given by the school methodologist, I was told that I’ll be dropped into deep water which meant teaching a group of four teenagers aged fourteen and fifteen. Straight away I started reminding myself of what kind of students my classmates and I were in that age and it frightened me. As far as I could remember most teenagers are disturbed by silly things. Before my first class I promised myself that I won’t become a boring and routinized teacher like the professors I remember from my academic years, but an active and stimulating the imagination one. The day of my first lesson came, while I was sitting in the teachers room listening to what these teenagers were talking about just before the class started, I doubted in what I promised myself. I couldn’t be any more wrong. During the first class, I figured out during an introduction chat that all four boys play the same computer game as I do and it gave me an idea for the next day. I decided to adapt to the the students and create exercises and games based on their interests. The game that we all play has many characters and I created what we now call “ League of Legends Battleships” practicing present simple. My students were positively surprised during the second day and it integrated us immediately. Since then, my duty as a teacher became much easier and my students come to every class with interest what we will do today. Adapting to student’s interests won’t be enough make you a good teacher. After the first month of teaching I learned that I must always be organized and open minded, to have an a, b and c plan for each lesson or topic. Students usually come to extra English classes after their public school, which means they might sometimes be tired and not every idea of yours will interest them. I’ve done that by using my free time in between classes to prepare for(already prepared class) a class in another way. This keeps my work organized in my personal teacher folders, which means that now, after 8 months of brainstorming, I have access to many different ideas for a specific topic. At the end of each semester, every student is given a survey to complete. From these statistics I have learned that most students enjoy classes with me because I am my true sefl every day. I can say that I’ve done that unconsciously. I’m a person who likes to make jokes and have a laugh. I always try to make my engage and activate phases of a class as entertaining as possible, coming up with games and ideas that are in trend in everyday life and changing some rules to fit into a specific topic that we are covering during that lesson. I’ve had 1 to 1 classes with individual students that were very shy, didn’t want to speak too much and were afraid to make mistakes. I can truly relate to these people because I remember myself from thirteen years ago when we moved to Ireland with my family. I was a ten year old boy who had no English at all. With these cases, it took me some time to figure out how to overcome their fearness to speak. It required a lot of patience and indulgence for them to get used to my personal characteristics. After some time, these students started treating me not just like a teacher but like someone who’s been in their shoes before. I always share my everyday learning techniques and methods that I’ve been using to study English or German. At the end of their course I always see improvement in their language skills which motivates me to continue using my methods. In conclusion, I’ve realized that I learn something new with every class. Adapting to every individual’s interests isn’t an easy task, it requires time but it’s doable. This way planning classes and reaching my goals as a teacher at the end of the class is more possible. I’m not saying that I’m a very good teacher, but I wish I had a German teacher like me in high school.