Classroom Practice

Some students from my final class at Sheffield Hallam University

At primary school, I participated willingly in just about everything. I was more than competent in reading, writing and arithmetic, I played various sports skilfully and with vigour and, above all else, I really enjoyed working with my hands – making pots and various dinosaurs out of clay and jewellery out of copper, silver and decorative stones. However, I hated ‘music and movement’ or anything where I had to ‘perform’. 

 

I recall quite vividly one lesson where, one by one, each member of the class had to stand up and sing a few lines from the Christmas Carol – In the Bleak Midwinter. As I waited for my turn, I became more and more terrified but, luckily for me, I didn't have to perform. Whether time had just run out in the lesson or Mr. Smith, my teacher, had just noticed my increasing levels of agitation, I was truly grateful for being exempted from this humiliating experience.

 

My classroom

 

In my professional life, I have since overcome my fear of standing up in front of an audience and speaking and have given many talks to a wide variety of people and, when I had to deliver my practice sessions, I was certainly not lacking in confidence. I certainly made mistakes, mainly because I tried to be original with my lessons rather than just use something ready made from a standard textbook, and sometimes they didn’t work well. However, I recorded each lesson and wanted to learn from my mistakes and, by my last lesson, I thought that I’d got the basics right.

 

I am not any kind of expert in education, but I know how to ‘engage’ my students and, even though I took on board most of the comments made by the various observers who sat in on every lesson and graded my performance, I felt really quite offended when some of my lessons were ‘marked down’ because I had shown too much exuberance.

 

A happy ending

 

If someone wants to criticise the way that I explain a point of grammar, fair enough, but surely the best teachers are those that are enthusiastic, make the students feel comfortable and bring humour and fun into the classroom? OK, I might have been guilty of talking too much or too quickly at times but, when you are faced with a set of students of various nationalities with very different levels of English and whom you have met for the first time, this probably happens to everyone. As budding stand up comedians know only too well, there is nothing worse than stony silence.