A student with a teacher's hat on - part 1

Every time I see other people teach, I always wonder about my own teaching style. And I did just that yesterday for the entire period of my Spanish class. Yes, I have decided that it's time to brush up on my rusty-yet-still-there Spanish by taking up an Intermediate class. But since the class was short of students yesterday, I was asked to join the Beginner II class for the day. I was more than happy to do so, since I had little to zero confidence in my ability to say more than "Hola, me llamo Tia." :p

So there I was sitting in a class as a student, listening to the teacher, diligently taking notes, participating in the activities, and doing all the required assignments. But for some reasons, I couldn't stop observing the way the teachers taught (I had a female teacher for the first hour and a male for the second hour). I watched closely how they interacted with us, the students, how they managed the class, how they directed questions and instructions, basically my other half of my brain wanted me to put on my teacher's hat and observe the teachers.

I like to observe other people teach because I know that I could learn from their best (and poor) practices. So yesterday, I took some mental notes of my two teachers and due to my limited brain capacity, I figure that I should write them here.
(Let's just say that the female teacher is Ana, and the male is Manu).

1. First impression matters

Sorry... I've been slacking off

It's been months since I last wrote something here. I've a million reasons for 'missing in action' but mainly it's because I've been writing more in my native language on Facebook (for those who are on my friends list, you know what I'm talking about...).

I'll definitely start writing again since I seriously need to brush up my writing skills for some tests purpose. OK, I know that there are a billion reasons why someone should write more and better, but for me, it's mainly so I get more comfortable writing about different topics in such a short period of time. Oh, I'll definitely share with you what I think about this kind of exam--for sure I can say, it's excruciatingly painful on the brain! :p

Cheers,
-me-

Do you email, text, call or Facebook your parents?

I came across an interesting blog on communications with parents in the digital age. The writer was amazed "how DIFFERENT parent-teacher communications seemed to be for each teacher [...] You’d think that with so many new communications tools available to us in the digital age (from cell phones, to e-mail, to Facebook) it’d be EASIER now for teachers to talk to parents. But it seems like it’s getting HARDER. One parent might prefer the phone. Another might just find e-mail easier. One parent might check their e-mail 10 times a day; another might check it twice a week." (Tyler, 2011). 

Technology doesn't always make life easier for us, and this is true in the case of parent-teacher communication. Some parents are extremely busy that they prefer that teachers communicate via email and have only-call-when-it's-emergency policy. While other parents don't have an access to email 24/7 and prefer that we call them (although they don't always pick up or check their voicemail, so teachers have to continue pressing redial). And surprisingly, some parents want to "friend" teachers on Facebook so there's a more "open" communication! Complicated, isn't it? 

When I grew up, the only way that my teachers could communicate with my parents was via "student diary." It's basically a book where both parents and teachers write comments and notes to each other about homework, upcoming school events, and reminders. Because there were about 40-something kids in my class and there's only 24 hours in a day, my teachers wrote a simple note on the board and asked all of us to manually 'copy-paste' the note onto our student diary. Of course, they reminded us a thousand times to show it to our parents at home! Still complicated, isn't it?

As a homeroom teacher, I asked my parents to identify which mode of communication that worked best for them during parent orientation day. It turned out that the majority favored phone calls to their cellphones and text messages, and only a few mentioned emails. I ended up only calling my parents in the case of emergency because I had to share the only phone available in the teachers room with 15something teachers. Plus we had to go through the school operator to get connected to the outside world. So I learned that sending SMS worked best! My parents were very responsive and replied to 90% of my text messages. On top of that, I had a record of our communication for further purpose. Worked out well, didn't it?

On  the down side, I had to pay all of the expenses of the text messages!