The End of the Course

For the past four weeks I have been learning how to teach English as a foreign language. I sat in a classroom for at least seven hours a day, reviewing grammar rules and functions, playing classroom games, learning teaching techniques, lesson planning, and even doing a little teaching of my own. It has been a rewarding experience, and I believe that given the short amount of time, I have successfully learned how to begin my teaching career. Time will tell, of course, if I indeed become an exceptional teacher, and I certainly need more experience to that end. But let me take this time to say that I found the TEFL course to be quite satisfactory. I found the trainers to be supportive and knowledgeable, the classroom time to be structured and relevant, and the overall course to be worth the investment.

And so today I taught my last "guinea pig" class. This lesson was part of our Materials Project for the course, which obligated us to make all of the materials we wanted to use in our 45 minute lesson. We could use a teaching book as a guide, but all texts, worksheets, and exercises had to be made by us. This was a bit of a challenge but also quite liberating as we didn't have to follow a boring or out-of-date book and instead had the opportunity to pick the topic and lesson ourselves.

For this particular lesson, I decided to use an exerpt from the article I wrote last fall on Educar en la Calle. I chose this text because it was already written by yours truly, and is written at a fairly advanced level (which is important since this lesson was for an advanced level 4 class). I also thought it would be particularly interesting for my students since it is a project ongoing in Seville, Spain and it's about soccer and helping children (and who doesn't like saving kids and sports?). So, I cut down the text, made a worksheet out of it (complete with pretty pictures) and made some comprehension exercises to go along with it. I ended the lesson by having the students talk about which cause they would help and why, and how they would help it. (The example I gave: I am going to help animals because puppies are cute, and I will create sad advertisements to guilt people into adopting abandoned pets.) Rest assured, my students came up with better ideas than I did.

This lesson went really well and was my favorite yet. The topic is close to my heart so I enjoyed creating the lesson, and furthermore, the students really enjoyed learning about the project and talking about causes they care about. In fact, as we were running out of time at the end of class, I motioned at the clock to show the time and a student waved me off in order to finish the discussion. 

I left my last lesson of the course feeling energized, accomplished, and proud. A great way to end my first teaching experiences! [For a visual reference, this is what I imagined in my head:]

And so, at this moment, I do believe the course has positively impacted my life (although it is a bit annoying that I subconsciously name the parts of speech within almost any sentence I read, and also that I have a strange urge to write random things in phonemic script) and that it will continue to transform my future. Because of my experiences, I am now considering a future in education of some kind, whether it be teaching English around the world, going back to school to get my teaching degree, or going to graduate school for public education policy. And although I still have no clue where this adventure will lead, they all sound like good options to me.