Overbooking

On the 12nd November it was quite stressful, because we were three students of the CAP in the classroom. This time the teacher started checking that all the students had done their dossiers and in case that they had not, Núria wrote a negative note in their agendas and when they had already three, they had a negative mark as well. I noticed that while she was checking this, the majority of the students had not any task to do, so they talked to each other and the classroom was quite uncomfortable. However, some students were filling the dossiers at this moment. Moreover, I realized that the more time the teacher needs to do something, the louder the students talk.

Afterwards, the lesson started as usually and the topic of this lesson was a dialogue. The teacher asked some students to read different parts of the text and she repeated the words that they did not pronounce properly. The following task was to answer some questions about the dialogue, but this time the whole classroom did it together and the students seemed to be very motivated and they raised their hands when they knew the answer. Moreover, the lesson was interrupted many times and the teacher had to ask for silence.

I would like to say some interesting aspects that I have observed. Núria spoke in English when she had to talk to everyone in the classroom, but when she talked to an individual student she spoke in Catalan. From my point of view, it could help the students not to believe or respect the teacher, because if they could get things easier, they would try to get it every time and not to make an effort to understand English.

On the other hand, I have still some problems to know how to explain a word without translating it, because the children have a low level, they have some difficulties to understand English, and we need more time to say something.

Any suggestion?