Lesson 4: a parallel lesson on Guiding

I have been a little sick for a week now, but luckily I have not gotten very ill, so I have been hanging in there. I had not slept very well last night, so I was very tired. I found out that so were the students: several of them were yawning in the classroom.

Only 11 students showed up today, so the lesson was quiet and peaceful. We covered the topic of guiding with the group B, the same class I conducted for the group A on Tuesday.

The biggest problem on the lesson was that Moodle and document camera were not working properly. Moodle kept throwing me out and I had to sign back in several times. When I switched to the document camera, the visibility was mostly very blurry. I fixed the problem by showing items on either apparatus that worked, since I had paper or transparency copies of everything that we did. While the students were working on something I set up the computer again. Also another problem emerged: the class was held in a Wine classroom, so we did not have computers there, as in all other lesson. Therefore the students did not have access to Moodle and online documents.

This meant that most the students did not have the text they were supposed to read on being a good guide and to do the related exercises. I asked the students read the same text in pairs, and two students made some copies for those who did not have them. We had to skip one grammar exercise on passives, because the material is in Moodle. The students were asked to pick any sight or place or interest in Kuopio and to write a short guiding script on it in small groups, using guiding language which we studied today, as well as passive structures. The students were creative and came up with Puijo Tower, harbour, Tahko resort, and Matkus shopping centre, which is the newest place of interest. The lesson went swiftly and the students managed to finish even most of their homework in class.

I have now completed three fourths of my teaching practice: only 3 double lessons to go!