On January 23 I observed Angel Rios' speaking class. I noticed that Rios is a very energetic teacher who likes to move around a lot and gets very excited about the students' learning. I think this is important for his class because it makes for a very comfortable environment. In this class, there was one student that had a presentation to give about another student. It was very interesting to watch and I could tell that the student was very engaged with this activity. He was even able to make his presentation humorous and that was something that made the whole class comfortable and could have lowered their affective filters. After the presentation, the students had a worksheet in which they were to define and make a sentence with a few words. The students worked on this during class and shared their answers when they were done. After the students read a passage that contained those vocabulary words and Rios went over the passage each section at a time. He explained that when reading a passage in English, you may come across words you do not know and that that is okay, just keep reading and get the main idea from the reading. I was actually able to take his advice and later complete a Spanish reading that had been difficult for me because of the words I was not sure of. In the end, this classroom observation showed me the importance of patience when working with students. Rios patiently waited for them to finish their vocabulary worksheets and patiently helped them work through the reading passage.
My next tutoring session was with Turki. We met at the Starbucks on Tennessee Street, the usual spot, and started the session with a causal conversation about life and his short term English goals. Turki decided he didn't want to continue with the second session of CIES classes, and that he wanted to rather focus solely on passing the IELTS exam. He said he found the CIES classes to be helpful, but also distracting. He said he thinks he's gotten the most out of his classes and that it would be more productive for him to study on his own. Where I don't completely agree with his logic, it is his life and I trust his decision making. For this session he brought his own material that he wanted to focus on. This time it was a reading passage that I even found to be quite difficult, and I was once again impressed by his far reach in practice and ability. The reading passage was accompanied by a set of numerous comprehension questions that we reviewed and answered together. The qu...
Comments
Post a Comment