Reflections on teaching and photography

A good teacher should always take time to reflect on what worked and what didn't after any lesson. I've been a little guilty lately of not quite putting in as much effort as I used to and so I thought I'd record my reflections on what went well today for future use.

TG2 (Tour Guides - General English)
With 14 highly motivated, polite, hard-working and mature students, it's pretty hard for things to go wrong. They do respond particularly well however to my 'irregular verbs' quiz which I do every Saturday morning. They learn ten words over the weekend and then I present them with a PowerPoint with the relative words blanked out within a sentence.

The catch is that I try to use them outwith the context the students are used to. For example, met his match instead of met his friend, made a fuss instead of made a cake or spent some time instead of spent some money. This increases the challenge for the brighter students and they all look forward to the prize giving ceremony (a handshake and a chocolate bar) more for the kudos they get for 'beating the teacher' (if they get 10/10) rather than the marks counting for anything (which they don't).

When working through the coursebook, there was a page on items of clothing. They enjoyed talking about the cultural differences in clothing styles between Omanis and Europeans and I learnt what they wear under their dishdashas and abayas; boys wear nothing but a towel under their dishdasha (which, they assured me, never falls down) and girls wear jeans and t-shirts under their abayas.

As part of the discussion, I asked why some boys wear a hat and some wear a scarf. There's no reason apparently, but it gave me a great excuse to blip Abdullah, Ali, Hamed and Fahad after the lesson!


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After the trip to the beach the other day, I put most of the photos on the college computers so the students could see them. The response I'm getting is incredible. The students love the photos and all of them are requesting copies after viewing. I have now become infamous with regard to my camera, not because I'm particularly good, but because I am capturing them in a way they've never seen before, namely in a natural state enjoying themselves. More often than not, I'm making them look really good too, well, my 1000D is at any rate!

Even those who weren't in my beach group are demanding a viewing of the photos, which is a nice thing I think.