First day at school

This was the first week of my practicum at Çevre Primary School. First, I wanted to familiarize myself with the school environment. The school was in a nice neighborhood and quite big, but I think the school yard was not big enough. When I walked in the teachers’ room, I saw about ten teachers, half of them were native speakers and the room was like an office. Everybody has a computer, a desk and they were working. It was only Primary School English Language Department, but there were a lot of teachers. Actually, it impressed me. It was a good start for me because the atmosphere was very positive. They have different timetables for 1,2,3,4 and for 5,6,7,8th graders. They have 9 lessons in a day. Our co-operating teacher was a nice lady and we gave us a warm welcome. She  said that they always check homework and hand out the quizzes on Mondays and it would be better if we could come on fridays. I also wanted to see real classroom activities rather than observing students just sitting quietly and doing their quizzes. I attended the fourth graders’ lesson, 4/E. The classroom was small there were not enough space on the walls for everything. There was just a small part for English, at the corner of a notice board. I think more visual materials could work for young learners. But they had a smartboard so probably the teacher used it to show visual materials, too.  When I entered this classroom most of the students were sitting in their places and they weren’t so loud. When the teacher started to check the homeworks, she wanted the groups to come over there and they started to talk with each other. The teacher had to speak very loud all the time. It created a stressful atmosphere. I was not sure if it was always like this or it was because she was tired, but she was totally a different person outside the classroom. I think she tried to be strict and keep the discipline so she was shouting and never smiled. During these two lessons I was trying to find out if it was because of teachers’ personality or the students’ misbehavior. Anyway, I didn’t like the way they check the homeworks. It made a chaos in the classroom. The teacher could ask them to hand in their homeworks on Monday and give it back on the other day. In my opinion it would be more practical. As I said before it was a good start for me. Especially the professional atmosphere in the teachers’ room changed my mind a little about the private school. It could be nice and motivating to work in a place like this because I think I need that motivation.  But of course it is just the first week, I need to think about it again at the end.

Actually i have some worries about doing my practicum in a private school because i didnt think i could work in this kind of school. It is always said it is easier to work in a public school.students english level was good they were fourth graders but they understood everything teacher said. It was weird for me to see fourth graders speadking in english beacuse i started to learn english at fourth grade and never spoke properly it till university. It made me understand that it is really important to start leraning a language at an early age. Age is not the olnly factor of course for example teacher was speaking in English most of the time sometimes she shifted to Turkish but i think it is necessary. My teachers never used English as a communicative medium. It was always a medium for testing and giving grades and it was always on the paper. I saw the importance of  speaking in english during the lesson. I always thought that if i speak in english with these small kids they will never understand me because i thought first we need to learn everything that we need in a language but now i think in a very different way. I wish i could attend a class in public school to compare with my eductaion. This week actually was ful of comparisons.