Flexibility in lesson planning.

Hi everyone, welcome back to another entry!😄

We gathered in the classroom last week after our short break, our class was cut short since we had other activities to do first, we helped some of the students from our major who were working on their thesis by doing a sight translation test, it felt strange to be doing sight translation again after more than a year I think, but I think I did ok! Some of the students even complimented my tone of voice and it felt nice since it is something I feel like I have been struggling when interpreting. Followed by that, Regina, from our major as well, gave a really interesting presentation about the professional services of a translator and an interpreter, I think it is so nice to have the opportunity to have a professional translator and interpreter give us their tips and tricks and how to start in the business, not many people get this kind of opportunities and I think this presentation was so necessary since we are about to graduate and I don't feel that lost anymore. 

The bad thing was that we were left with around an hour or less for our English Didactics class. Even though we didn't have that much time, we were able to learn about some magic moments and unforeseen problems that a teacher can experience in the classroom and that they might not expect when planning their lesson.

I remember learning not so long ago about teachers always needing a plan b and having to improvise, but I think it is great to recall that information since we are about to start planning our own lessons and of course we need to have the direction we want our lesson to go but what happens if an activity that we thought would be so fun for the students turns out being the exact opposite? Or what if we are fached with technical issues? We can't rely on technology all the time, if something fails we need to be able to keep going with the lessons so we don't waste anyone's time and remain professional, these are the unforeseen problems I was referring to and it also involves the principle of flexibility in lesson planning.

We also learned that there needs to be objectives for each and every lessons whether we are working with productive or receptive skills, according to the document that teacher Orlando showed us, the elements to consider are: Time, specific topic to use, expected result, how to notice it. For example: At the end of the day, SWABT (Students will be able to) use adjectives to describe personality when answering a question. That is the perfect example of how an objective should be made for a lesson and for the students.

Last but not least, there can also be magic moments in the classroom, things that were not planned but that is exactly the beauty of it, when introducing a new topic students can get overly excited and they might want to participate many times but the teacher needs to remain in control, while planning the lesson we might think that we will move on from the topic quickly or we can plan a class activity and in reality it will take more time than the expected but you just need to let things flow! That is exactly what happened with Regina's presentation, even though it was something that was not planned with a lot of anticipation and we missed a few minutes of our class we were still able to learn very important information and we all had a lot questions which caused the presentation to take more time than the expected, but in the end, it is a magic moment.

Since the class was cut short, I didn't write down that many information last Thursday and there is not a lot of content for this entry however, I still learned some new things, for example SWABT means Students Will Be Able To and also, when students don't show up to a lesson, teachers call it "Mortality", it feels nice to be learning even more about the world of teaching and their language!

Thank you for reading and hopefully we will meet again this week with no interruptions. Stay tuned for the next entry, bye-bye!👋