Teaching Practice

    My days of practice teaching at Supang National High School have been full of enthusiasm and joy. It has never seemed dull to teach my students since the first day I began practicing. Handling 5 sections for 5 days straight was a bit of a challenge for me because I had no prior teaching experience; it was a first for everything.

    As planned in my lesson plan, I spent my first day primarily concentrating on the lesson activities. I would begin my class with a greeting and ask one of the students to lead the prayer before beginning my lesson with a reading drill, which is similar to discovering new vocabulary that we would see throughout our lesson, and I would give them 10 new vocabularies to write down and we would discuss the vocabulary the following day. Continue with the next activity, which is a debate. Because our lesson focuses on connecting texts to dispositions in real life, I divided the students into two groups, boys and girls, and asked them to choose a topic to defend: "wealth but not a good family life" or "poor but a good family life." I gave them the rest of our class time to argue with each other, and then I questioned the students about the activity and the lesson they learned from it.

The debate activity in the silver class

   On the second day, I continued the lesson plan with the abstraction. We would discuss the meaning of the 10 vocabulary words that they had learned the day before. Then we would play a game in which I would pass a ball of paper to them, and they would peel the paper to see the meaning of the vocabulary. They would have to guess which vocabulary it was, to test their knowledge of the new vocabulary we had just discussed. Then they would be handed a sheet of paper with the summary of "A Raisin in the Sun" by Lorraine Hansberry, and I would ask a student to read one of each paragraph as we discussed the content of each paragraph. After reading the summary, we review it again, starting with the title, author, characters, and important message of the story.

passing the ball game with the platinum class

    On the third day, continue with the application. We begin by repeating the story again to check if students remember the important elements. Before we moved on to their next task, I offered them an icebreaker in the shape of a video in which they had to guess the color rather than the word; there were three rounds, and each round became quicker and faster. After the fun, I asked the students to choose one of 3 sentences: "What I just read reminds me of the time when I...", "I agree with what I just read because in my own life...", or "I don't agree with what I just read because in my own life..." After choosing one sentence, students will reflect on the story and apply it to their own lives. I gave them 15 minutes to do their work, and after that, I would select a random student to read their work in front of the class and present it to their classmates.

1 student from the silver class presented their work in front of the class

    On the fourth day, my lesson plan concluded with a quiz. I created 10 multiple-choice questions related to the story, A Raisin of the Sun, and I gave them 15 minutes to complete their quiz and answer the question on a separate sheet of paper. After they had done answering the questions, I asked them to swap their answer papers with their seatmates so that we could examine them together. I would read the questions and choices out, then give the students some time to guess the answer before telling them the correct answer. After grading their seatmate's answer, they would pass the paper to me so that I could record their grade for my cooperating teacher. We spent our remaining class time with two riddles that I learned in Indonesia (I don't know the names of the two riddles because I learned them in middle school). The students enjoyed the riddles, and I also demonstrated how to figure out them so they could use them for someone else. Before I finished my lesson, I assigned homework to my students, asking them to draw their dream family or family life on bond paper and submit it to me by Monday.

I am demonstrating the riddle in the gold class

    On the fifth day, because it was Friday and the focus is on a reading program, my cooperating teacher suggested that I present a video or a story to the students. On that day, I prepared two short videos for students to watch. I wanted the videos to be relevant to the theme in my lesson plan; one is about a girl who hated her deaf and mute father, and the other is about two sisters who hated each other and one of them developed cancer because she wished her sister to die. After the students watched the two videos, I asked them to write a three-paragraph essay, with the first two paragraphs repeating the video and the third paragraph summarizing and conveying the message that the students learned from the two videos. I gave them the rest of the class time to complete their task before they handed it to me.

the students in platinum class watching the video (about a girl who hated her deaf and mute father) 

    On the second week, I was unable to teach since the Philippines was hit by a typhoon and we were advised to stay indoors for the entire week.