A difficult afternoon, a difficult experience

I was teaching in a run-state school of El Jagüel three months ago before winter holidays. I had lessons on Wednesdays from 3 to 5.20 in the afternoon. It was 3^rd year secondary school and students were a bit excited because they had had an exam during the previous period. In general terms, they did not have serious discipline problems.

We had finished the unit on comparatives and superlatives. My teaching goal was to make students aware that there are two ways of comparing people, objects, animals and places. And the descriptions could be done not only written but also orally. My learning goal was to teach comparative and superlative form of short and long adjectives not only to describe but also to carry out a survey in the classroom.

As it was almost the end of the term, I decided to test them orally before winter holidays. While I was evaluating them, the rest of the students were working with a consolidation task except for two of them, a boy and a girl, who were arguing and insulting at each other. I had to interrupt the oral test many times, but they continued misbehaving. Suddenly, another student told me that the girl had a cutter in the pocket of her jeans. Immediately after that, I checked this information and it was really true. I asked the girl to come to my desk and to give the cutter to me. Fortunately, and after arguing for some minutes, the girl did not hesitate and put her cutter on the desk.

Meanwhile, I asked another student to go to the staff room and to call one of the prefects to come to my classroom. When she arrived, I told her the situation and both boy and girl were sent to the Headmistress office. They were suspended for two days.

All in all, as Rahilly and Saroyan (1997) state “meaningful experiences allow to collect qualitative and quantitative data about classroom teaching and teaching thinking” (p.4). This will be very important not only for analysis but also for learning.

That was the most difficult experience in my career because I did not know how these students would react towards me. I decided not to be involved in the argument but to talk to them in a very cold way as well as to resort on the prefect to help me. Fortunately, everything was solved in a peaceful way.

References

Rahilly, T. J, & Saroyan, A. (1997). Characterizing poor and exemplary teaching in

higher education: Implications for faculty development. Montreal, Quebec: McGill

University