The Challenges I Faced at
School
Anna Zakharova
Outline:
I. Introduction:
Teaching practice is not easy. A student is forced to face numerous challenges
he or she has never experienced before. Pupils challenge the young teacher with
their ignorance, indifference or lack of motivation; the school plays on his or her
nerves with its unstable time-table and work overload; moreover, suddenly the
trainee discovers many personal challenges. The latter were the kind of challenges
I experienced at school, among them my own language incompetence, lack of
assertiveness, problems of establishing authority and relations with the teaching
staff.
To begin with, at school I suddenly found out that I dont know English. I didnt
remember a lot of things. Cutting it short, your own knowledge of English can turn
out to be insufficient for teaching.
Experience is the best teacher.. German Proverb. Experience is the best teacher.
German Proverb
13. A teacher stands in fear of teaching.. French Proverb. A teacher stands in fear of
teaching.
French Proverb
Apart from that, I was always in doubt about what I do. The thing is that at the
lesson you need to have control over too many things at once. You need to talk
yourself, and do it clearly, correctly and convincingly. Besides, you need to listen
to the pupils, take notice of the mistakes, and not forget to correct them. At the
same time you need to follow the lesson plan, the text in the book, and the time. By
the way, you need to keep them quiet. You also need to make sure your clothes are
neat, your pose is appropriate, and your voice and gestures are calm all this at
once! To sum up, you can never tell if you havent forgotten something, and thats
why you always feel unsure.
Aside from that, it turned out to be a problem to make children obey you.
Sometimes, if you dont hit your fist on the table from the very beginning, they
won't respect you and obey in the future.
The next difficulty is the need to maintain children's interest throughout the
lesson. You have to constantly change a kind of activity, to make sure the children
didn't know what to expect on the next lesson. For example, I had to explain the
past simple tense to the children. And, perhaps, it was the most difficult task for
me as a teacher. I watched a bunch of books and decided to present this
theme in the form of a fairy tale. I reminded the children about the Kingdom of
simple Present, where is the king Today, who are the servants: every day,
often, usually, sometimes, never, and said that next to him is the Past Simple
where is king Yesterday, who are the servants yesterday, a year ago, last year,
last week, last month etc. the Children listened to the tale with bated breath,
and immediately have learned a new time.
It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken
joy in creative expression and knowledge.
Albert Einstein
To know how to suggest is the great art of teaching. To attain it we
must be able to guess what will interest: we must learn to read the
childish soul as we might a piece of music. Then, by simply
changing the key, we keep up the attraction anil vary the song.
Henri Frederic Amiel
Every pupil has different writing level ability. Some of pupils have higher
intelligences in which they can work faster and do all of activities with good result.
In other side, there are some pupils that cannot work fast and get good score
because of their lack ability in English. For the pupils in low level, teacher cannot
give tasks the same as with pupils who have the higher level because it can
pressure those pupils. In this situation, teacher feels hard to organize the class and
give the appropriate activities with their level.
The classroom management also has important role to help pupils in study.
Teacher should manage the classroom to attract children to involve in the
classroom activities. Teacher can set up the classroom based on the topic of
lessons. Children can work collaboratively on a writing project, but it needs to be
carefully organized on the part of the teacher. For example, when I was an Intern in
elementary school, I had to spend extra-curricular activities. I've chosen the topic
'English tea-drinking'. One child should make the presentation and two others
pupils should present it in front of other children. To add to it, when pupils are
divided into groups, teacher should divide the class into groups which is each
group should consist of different level of students ability; from the smart pupil up
to the low pupil. If it is in a pairs, both of them should have the same quality of
cognitive in order to prevent the domination from one of them and to maintain the
balancing participation of the pupils. For a case to prevent the children from get
boring because the materials that delivered by teacher is done or for pupils which
have high cognitive competence, teacher should prepare another activities or give
another tasks for them.
