by Beatriz Costa
I’m back at my community in Brazil, and I just began teaching English and French classes in my old school. Being back in my community and sharing my learnings has been incredibly gratifying. It feels like nothing has changed, but I have.
Planning, creating, and teaching engaging and insightful classes are not easy tasks, but I’m excited to keep improving as a teacher and leader.
At first, I thought my biggest challenge would be finding people interested in taking the classes, since unfortunately, my old school has a big reputation for dropouts and failures. To my surprise, though, the interest form had already over 50 responses in less than three days. Day after day, many of the students are getting more and more excited about being in class.
After the first day of classes, even more people reached out to join. For English, I started with greetings, the verb “to be”, articles, numbers, and colors. I also touched on greetings, the verb être (to be), professions, and nationalities for French.
The past few weeks have been full of learning and adapting. After trying different types of lessons and dynamics, I’m beginning to understand what works best for each of my four classes. So far, we’ve explored songs, online games, mnemonics, and even miming. I’ve been doing my best to keep students engaged and interested.
The students are enjoying our time together, and I’ve aleady heard some heartwarming feedback from them and even from teachers who were curious about the progress of my classes.
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