Week 4: Welcoming the New Students

 Assalamualaikum everyone!

This week, our college is officially welcoming new semester 1 students to IKM KL, and this week will be my first time meeting them. According to my schedule, half of my teaching time will be focused on semester 1 students, while the rest of my schedule is divided equally for the senior classes. Since semester 1 students are still new, for the whole week, they seemed to be quite eager when they entered the classroom. Everyone arrived on time and was participative during the ice-breaking session. During this part of the lesson, I actually implemented the first unit of the course into the ice-breaking session with the first part of the course content, which was actually focused on the same thing: Self-introduction. 

STRENGTH: Since I have been teaching technical students for the past few weeks, it gave me a bit of an idea of how to conduct the junior classes. I was also able to anticipate a variety of behaviors coming from each course based on the senior classes that I have taught. For instance, the nature of students from the Welding course tends to be much more chaotic and teacher-reliant when compared to the Mechanical Design Drawings students, which consists of students who are much more mellow and self-reliant. Having this knowledge helped me in preparing myself mentally and physically for each class I was about to go in. 

WEAKNESS: Even though I was teaching the same subject for all the classes while making my lesson plans, I failed to take into consideration the fact that the number of students for each class would vary depending on the course they were taking. One of the classes I taught only had 5 students, while another class had 15 students. The large difference in the student numbers affected the activity flow. For example, a speaking activity was supposed to take about 50 minutes to complete, but due to the small number of students, the activity was completed within 15 minutes, and I had to come up with impromptu activities to fill in the remaining time of the class.

OPPOTUNITIES: Having a mentor who has 10+ years of teaching experience definitely has been a bonus for me since she's very helpful in giving me ideas and suggestions on ways to make my classes more interesting for technical students who are commonly less enthusiastic when it comes to theory classes. One of the suggestions she gave me was that I should be adapting the available machines and appliances in the students' workshop into my teaching, where I should have students practice their English communication skills by explaining how to use the machines that they are familiar with using the English language. This definitely opened up so many possibilities for me since I did not consider these machineries around me as something that I could use for teaching.

THREATS: The English subject is a theoretical subject that requires students to sit in a class, and listen to lectures, compared to their workshop classes, where students are able to move around and work on their skills using machinery and various appliances. This means that students commonly have short attention spans and have trouble focusing on tasks after instructions are given because they are used to working independently (while being supervised by their workshop teachers). This means that I usually have to repeat my instructions during classes several times in order to ensure that every single person in the class understands what I am asking them.

All in all, I hope that the future classes will be better and I will be able to overcome all these boundaries in my journey to becoming a better teacher.