Entry 8

Dear Meowmeow,

    Yesterday was my first time to teach on the stage. Although I have already been working as a mentor at a cram school for one and a half years, this experience was totally different from that. At first, I thought it would be as simple as a regular presentation. However, when my teammates and I were preparing for the teaching, I actually felt a lot of pressure and got really nervous. We started from the most basic vocabulary and tried to recall the ways we ourselves learned the language. We surfed the Net to see if there were some interesting videos or songs to show the students since we know how important it was to draw students’ attention at the very beginning. As a result, we picked a song introducing all the alphabets in Spanish. It was actually really funny, so we sang it again and again. After we picked out the right song, we got our hands on something serious. We divided the whole teaching into three parts, greetings, phrases, and self-introduction. In the beginning of the class, we handed out the work sheets to each student. In the first part, we taught everyone how to accurately pronounce the numbers in Spanish. Then, we put the numbers into sentences to show people how to tell their own ages. We also told them some essential greetings like “Hola!” and “Adios!”, which mean “Hello!” and “Goodbye!” Next, we taught them how to describe the hobbies they had. For example, we usually say I like to do something in English, but in Spanish, we say “Me gusta…” We can also describe something that we don’t like to do by adding a word “No me gusta…” We picked some random phrases of activities and told the students how to say it in Spanish. Everybody repeated after us though they might not have the accurate pronunciation. After that, we combined all the things we taught above and show them how to do a proper self-introduction. All of our teammates introduced ourselves first and then we invited the students to come up to the stage to introduce themselves one by one. They sometimes made some mistakes that made the whole class laugh out loud. Nonetheless, I felt really proud of them at the same time in fact. It was really touching to see them practice so hard. At the end of our teaching, we replayed the song and invited everyone in class to sing it together. Since we were the first team to teach on the stage, we didn’t have the chance to revise our project by watching the other teams’ teaching. One team that impressed me the most was the second team who taught us the ways to break up in Korean. That was really interesting and might be practical for someone in a relationship with a Korean. We even played a game afterwards. This was a precious experience and I would never forget about it. I also hope that we can do better in the teaching next week!