Teaching Practice

Our school practice
You know, that there is no secret that the students who are doing their fourth year are fresh from their first fulltime teaching practice and I am not an exception.
A week ago I came back from my school practice and I am full of emotions and positive fillings.
I was allocated to a comprehensive school in Donetsk. And I did my fulltime practice as a teacher of English and foreign literature. I spent my first week observing lessons in different classes and giving occasional lessons myself. Sometimes I had to substitute some teachers because of their illness. At these moments I understood that teaching is not my calling, but I must do it. I think that people, who find teaching as a calling must be absolutely stark raving mad. I should admit that speaking about my responsibilities during school practice, I had my hands full doing all sorts of tutorial and instructional work. And some more responsibilities for the class rested squarely on my shoulders. Apart from conducting lessons I had a thousand one other time consuming duties as out-of-school activities with my class as a master teacher.
As for the school staff, I can say that mainly there were not too young but consequently, enthusiastic, energetic and willing to share experience teachers. I was doing my practice under the superviser’s control, who is a fully-flagged teacher and she always helped me in case I had some problems…
And now I want to spent some time writing some words about children. You know, every school has disobedient pupils as well as diligent and assiduous. And the fact is that children will be children everywhere. Honestly, I had some discipline problems with boisterous children who always wanted to talk back to me and tried to play some jokes and tricks on me.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough knowledge about how to keep them well in hand, but I tried no to bark out orders, but participate in personality reinforcing interaction with them. I always tried to establish a warm supportive and nonthreatening climate in the class. I knew, that it would help me to get a feedback from those, who were diligent pupils, who were quick in the up-takes, could catch words on the fly…I tried to imbue them with love of English and to support their interest unflagged , keep them busy and involve them into work.
So, analyzing my first fulltime practice, I can say that I need some more skills in teaching, because I am too lenient and mind-bind teacher, that’s why I had the discipline problems…
To sum up I want to write the next words: “ A good teacher should be a bit of an actor. This is part of the technique of teaching”. And these words are absolutely true, because I have checked them in practice… And, no matter whether you are standoffish or a mind-bind teacher, no capacity will be more important for you than a disinterested love of children and of your subject area.