Diary of a Trainee Teacher: Week 6 (7th to 11th Mar)

I start to feel sad while I'm writing this post… Week 6 is gone and I am ONLY eight days away from the end of my training.

At the same time, we approach the end-of-second-term evaluation and you can feel it in the environment: students feel concerned and overwhelmed with exams and project handovers, teachers get stressed out with exam planning, preparation, correction and evaluation…

And talking about exams, this week I had to slightly modify the model of exam of Unit 5 and 6 I had prepared for 1st BACH. It's advisable to level off the exam items with the amount of time invested in class to learning and practising a certain language skill. And so their evaluation criteria. Imagine this: in class, conditional sentences were more dominant than the passive voice because of the tight timeframes and schedules. Would it be fair if the passive voice items scored higher than the conditional ones? Definitely, not.

This week I lead a session with 1st BACH about the Passive Voice. To this end, I prepare different materials that are displayed in the projector to recognise and identify the use of the passive voice. Learning how sentences are built gramatically but more importantly learning in which comunicative situations the passive voice is employed in English. Below you can find a couple of links to download some examples of press clips and receipts (instructive texts). Then I display a set of exercise models and we do them together. It contributes to build self-confidence and it's a good practice before the exam. 

Press clips - Passive Voice
Receipt - Passive Voice

Let me tell you a funny story regarding exams. There's this group, 4º B, whose teacher had to leave 15 minutes before the end of the session while they were doing an exam. Well, she asked me if I could take over and I kindly agreed. To my surprise, the behaviour of this group before an exam was far worse than my other group in 4º ESO. They were asking questions constantly and used bad manners in general. Conclusion: every group is a unique group, regardless of whether they belong to the same level or not.

During this week “Women's Day” was celebrated (8th March). However, no special activities were planned, except for some talks arranged with the Red Cross about Gender Violence.

A big poster made by a few students was hung on the hall.

To finalise, I'd like to highlight two coordination meetings that happened this week. The first one was led by the Vice-director and was aimed at learning about his functions (management and coordination of extracurricular activities, management of staff absense, and collaboration with the Head of Studies to create student lists and groups distribution at the beginning of the course.

The second one was led by the Head of Studies and was aimed at learning about the Discipline Management.