Both days at school it has poured rain at some point in the day. Teachers sometimes have to walk a long way to class, so apparently, they sometimes cut class when the weather is really bad! The nice thing about rain is that it cuts the heat. It is unbelievably hot and humid here. I’m not sure if they have PE when it’s raining. Today was the day that I really got into the classrooms. I followed Mehlaine’s schedule for the day. She is an 8th grade English teacher. Her first class is the Owls. They are the 11th section of 8th grade. Students are grouped by ability at MORMS, so the 11th section would just be a regular class of 8th graders (students learning at grade level). She warned me that their English wasn’t very good. This is a class with 60 students in it. It was very different from the STEM class I had seen yesterday. This building was much older than some of the other buildings of the school (having over 7,000 students, you have to have multiple buildings). I’m pretty sure there was no teacher in the classroom next door because those students were surprisingly loud, and running in and out of the classroom and down the hall. Despite all of the distractions, there were many students engaged in the lesson and wanting to go to the board to show their work. They were focusing on which words you stress in the sentence when you speak English. They struggled with the concept, so Mehlaine had to keep reminding them of the notes they had taken previously. The next 3 classes were all part of the STEM program, so the rooms were bigger and newer, and there was a maximum of 40 students per class. These students also struggled a bit with the concept, but they were more successful. One interesting thing she had the students do was to work with partners. They picked 5 out of 8 sentences. They underlined where the stress was in the sentence, and at the end of class, she called partners up to say the sentences out loud. In one class, many of the students struggled with the word “misled”, so they made sure to ask the teacher when they were still working on the assignment. Most of them mastered the word by the time they got up to say their sentences out loud. It was great to see them figure out how to speak in unison. A couple of the groups who really struggled with a lot of words got to hear their teacher say the sentences again before they were asked to repeat it. It was all very well done.
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AuthorJenn Henderson is a Teachers for Global Classrooms fellow. She will be traveling to the Philippines in June 2017. Archives
September 2017
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