A special case..

There´s nothing more rewarding than seeing your students progress, specially if its a special student.

I want to share a situation that I have with one special student. In my group of Junior High School, there´s a boy that presents TDA (Transtorno por déficit de atención, can anybody help me with the English translation?), I wasn´t told that until the 3rd or 4th week that we started classes. Of course I´d noticed that he behaved different than the rest of the class, but I didn´t even know about this situation. Sometimes his classmates started bothering him and he started crying, I talked to him several times in order to make him feel better, I encouraged him to do the activities but the most important (at least for me) is that in front of the group, I treated him the same way as I did with the rest. Why? Because students were treating him different, as if he were sick or something similar. Yes, it´s true that he´s not exactly the same and he can´t do things in the same way (not yet), but due to this, he always cried and felt inferior to his classmates.

After almost 2 months that I´ve been working with him, I´ve seen that he has improved. He used to be very shy, he cried once or twice a week, he didn´t do homework, in the classroom he never finished the activities that I assigned. Now, he´s more sociable, maybe not the most sociable one, but I see him happier, playing with some of his classmates and always smiling, he doesn´t cry anymore, and he does homework.

During the class, eventhough he didn´t finish the activities, when I checked the assignments I always put in his notebook a comment like "Very good", "Well done", "Great" this kind of notes made him happy, he always jumped and with a big smile said "yeeeahhhh very gooood!! :D". What´s been the consequence of that? Now he does the work better, if at the beginning he wrote 4 of 10 sentences now he writes 6 or 7. Perfection? Of course not, but I know is a big improvement for him. He´s motivated with the class and I feel great when he says "Hi teacher!", because I see him happy and smiling.

And that´s not all, I forgot to mention that he´s in Level 1 Beginners, and I really thought it was going to be very difficult for him to produce English but now he´s doing it, very basic commands but he´s trying.

I feel very happy and proud of him, of course I´m going to continue working and I´ll keep you informed of the progress. Any comment will be great! ^^

New class, new experiences...

As some of you know, besides English, I studied Biology and I graduated 2 months ago. Recently I was offered to teach Biology in one of the schools where I work, there were some troubles but at the end I got the class. I started teaching that subject today and I´m really excited because I can mix the two things I like the most. There´s a special thing about this situation, and it´s that I teach Biology and English to the same group, and since the school is bilingual I´ll be able to speak English in my Biology class which is wonderful. Students were asking me to speak English during the other class so they learn better, of course I did it and I think it worked.

I love my group, really enjoy teaching them and I know they do too ^^. Of course I have some "special" cases, but that will be the topic for the next post.