Colegio Santa Teresa de Jesús de Vedat in Torrent 1st and 2nd week-19th January

My time here at Colegio Santa Teresa de Jesús de Vedat in Torrent has been a mixed bag-some lessons that went absolutely great and some that went so badly I actually considered whether or not I had made the right decision to be a EFL teacher. I have had the longest journey to my school as it takes 55 minutes plus 16 minutes’ walk to get to my school. This has meant I have had to get up at 5am in order to get the metro at 6:41 so I can be in my school for 8:00 (so I have time to do photocopying before class starts at 8:15). Getting up early and then being back so late (usually after 5:00pm because there are not that many metros to where my stop is) and having to do lesson planning while being so tired has been really difficult and I feel despite giving my all I have not been able to perform at my best. I also feel despite how friendly and welcoming everyone was at the school that they were unable to provide me with all the support that I really needed. This is why I will be changing schools after this week-to a school which is in Moncada (the same one as Mandy is at) and is only 2 metro stops from where I am living which will be much better for me. This Friday I will be meeting Oana at the school in Moncada where I will be moving to-which I am looking forward to.

However I had a mix of both good and bad experiences at Colegio Santa Teresa de Jesús de Vedat which I want to tell you about-so that you know that amongst the bad I did have some small successes in my time at Colegio Santa Teresa de Jesús de Vedat.

My first week was very confusing and disorganised as I had to work with lots of different teachers and trying to coordinate my lessons around what they were doing was hard. None of my classes I see more than once a week and have a very wide age group in the classes that I teach- but I was able to recycle at least some of the lessons I had prepared. Last week I was able to try some fun games related to the present and present continuous as well as do the 'shake up wake up', a game of What's the time Mr Wolf and a game of Simon says (or as I did it Rebecca says) with my small groups of primary students. I thought I was doing ok on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday until I had my last class on a Friday-which they had forgotten to put on my timetable so I was unable to prepare anything more than an introduction. That 1st ESO class on a Friday were the noisiest class ever and did not listen to anything me or the teacher who was with me said-I have since found this week thoguh that the other 1st ESO groups are lovely and well-behaved so I think it may have just been either the activities or the fact that they are a badly-behaved group in general. I thought that they would enjoy standing up and not having to use the textbook-but that class seemed to prepare to be sat down doing things. I have found I work better when I have a lesson plan for the lesson already done and I am not good at improvising as I had to do on that lesson on Friday and earlier on in the week with one of my 4 ESO groups.

However, even with the best preparation, sometimes a lesson will go badly due to other things. I have found that some of the lessons that worked so well with one group, then fell on their face and did not work with another group who were at the same age group. I did a lesson on the future tense 3 times-one of which was for my observation which I thought did not go as well as it had done the previous 2 times I did the lesson with the other two groups who were at the same age. I did though get through the most important part of the lesson and I left feeling comfortable that the class understood the difference between will and going to now. This will hopefully help them to practise it more in the next lesson with their normal teacher.

I also did a successful reading lesson today which mainly focused on learning new vocabulary related to travel. It worked very well-the students were all engaged and interested and I feel they learnt a lot of new vocabulary they can use in future lessons. I also got to work with my favourite teacher Ernesto-who like me is new to the school and he is a pleasure to work with. A good example of this was the way in which he introduced me to the students which stopped them from asking any awkward personal questions at the start. Ernesto did however make one of the students apologise to me for a making the inappropriate remark of ‘You’re pretty’. He was more than half my age so it was a very inappropriate thing to say to me.

 I managed to do a successful lesson on can and adverbs as well with Maria on Tuesday that worked very well and students were able to practise using adverbs-I also adapted some of those materials to teach the other group (who had not done adverbs) about adverbs for the first time which they really seemed to enjoy. I plan on giving Ernesto the rest of the lesson I had for that 1st ESO group who I introduced to adverbs so they can have further practise using adverbs next week as I will not be there to give them that lesson. I know that lesson went well as one of the students that 1st ESO class yesterday said to me 'You are a good teacher'. Last week as well I had one student say she 'loved me' when I was on my way home after a busy day teaching. I also tried the bean dance that Amy showed us (jumping bean, mexican bean, french bean, and beans on toast) on Tuesday which the primary students seemed to prefer to the wake up shake up.
 Another success was my introduction to the 1st Bachillerato group (who were in Rome last week) which went well and I managed to get through all the material I had prepared (for the first time ever). My lesson was very personal as I told the students about where I was from and showed them a video about Cambridge. Most of the students seemed interested in going to Cambridge. I then asked them about their trip to Rome, which was very interesting to hear about-but I did have a moment where a student asked me what the word was for something and I culd not remember what it was in English. I have since realised the word I needed was hail/hailing as she wanted to know what the mixture of rain/ice is in English. I also found out some good suggestions of places I should visit in Valencia which I can now use as a guide when I explore Valencia at the weekend.

Yesterday though was bad-in two of my classes I could not get the projector to work so I had to get help which delayed the lesson-it was impossible to set up the projector before because there was another teacher in there (as in Spain oddly it is the teachers and not the students who have to move). My last class that I had yesterday was a disaster. For starters, Luisa the teacher whose class I was supposed to be teaching had forgot that I was teaching (as it was Wednesday) and thought it was one of her days. Then the projector would not work initially so I had to get one of the students to help. Thirdly I tried to install rules as Carolyn had told me-I set rules at the beginning that I wrote on the board and I checked the students had understood the rules-by asking questions like do you speak while I am speaking? (no), do you speak while a classmate is speaking? (no), and if you want to answer what do you do? (raise your hand), and do we speak in spanish? (no-we speak in english), and if you don't understand what do you say? (Sorry but could you repeat that please?).
However despite that they continually broke the rules and at several times during the lesson I had to sit and wait about 5 or 6 times before going through anything. Then when I started to go through things they would start talking again and would not listen to me. Moreover, none of this was helped by the fact Luisa the teacher who was teaching with me-was busy giving out exam results individually to each student during my lesson at the back of the classroom (even though I had asked her at the start if she could do this at the end of the lesson so as not to disrupt my class). This meant that when I was having difficulties with the students not listening Luisa was distracted and could not really do much to help me. At the end of that lesson I cried because I really did try to teach it and I spoke slowly so they could understand-but what could I have done? They didn't want to listen and so we only got through 1 activity.