Sixth journal

The Changing Teaching Act.

One curious fact about the teaching act is that is will be always surpising since it is a changing process. Teachers cannot assume that their performance and the students development will always be the same as it happens in a certain period of time. You will always find changing facts that will change the game rules and that will make you improvise to achieve significant changes.

This week was a totally unsatisfying one. As SENA Institute that is the one where I work on has a special belief about individual work it is crucial to ask students to put into practice all the facts and topics learned within on-site classes. Moreover, I think individual homework is necessary and an important stage of students´learning process. In this order of ideas, last week I asked students to do a piece of homework consisting of creating a PowerPoing presentation in which learners were supposed to put into practice the verb to be in its present tense. I gave them a personal example of the work that I wanted to see from them the present week. Additionally, I asked them if they had any question about the homewoork and they led me know that everything was clear.

I was quite sure that students were going to do great presentations since they have always been commited to their work and they had done good homeworks. Nevertheless, most of them did make use of Google Translator to do the homework. I was upset because I thought the instructions were clear and the topic was correctly covered. I asked them the reasons why they did not do the homework as they were expected to. students gave me unacceptable reasons and pretexts. 

Based on the events already described, I decided to ask them to do a new PowerPoint presentation using just a dictionary to translate unknown words. I just hope that students show more interest on developing communicative skills through presentations and similar activitis. Students have many beneficial aspects to learn from doing good homeworks and they have to take into account that they are missing important opportunities of becoming competent on the foreign lenaguage.