Teaching at a State School

by Bahar Acer / FLE 2013

Working at a state school is a valuable experience. It has some difficulties, but at the same time it has some positive and enjoyable sides. The school may not have the equipment that you need or want to use while teaching English. Therefore you can have some difficulties and say that “How can I teach English now?”  At the first days of my teaching, I had some difficulties both because of the reasons that I mentioned before and the place where I am working is too small. However, I could see that there were lots of things even in these situations.

The first and most important thing is to create a good relationship with your students and this is more important at state schools. At the beginning of the term, I asked my students a classical question, “Do you like English and why?”. I heard lots of negative answers and then learned the reason of these negative answers is caused by traditional teaching of English. For instance, they were taught vocabulary items by writing several times and they just read dialogues on the book like robots. I tried to change this firstly and I did not give such homework which cannot help the students develop their language abilities. Instead of these, I wanted my students to create a vocabulary box which they decorate on their own and they put the vocabulary items into the box day by day. Also, they made their own sentences with these vocabulary items and we played simple games with these items. For example, they tried to explain the vocabulary to their classmates with their mimics.

The next thing is creativity. Being creative and having an entertaining lesson are crucial and my students and I did lots of things during the term. I tried to give different things to my students. One of them was to give some frequently used idioms in English. All of my students, especially 6^th graders, like idioms very much. They also found some idioms and shared them with their classmates. Then a coincidence happened and our school participated in Tubitak Science Fair. I asked my students to prepare a project for the fair and they suggested that they could prepare a project related with idioms. They tried to explain the meanings of the idioms by drawing and caricaturing the meaning of them. They really worked hard and had lots of fun during this preparation time. At the end, we had a great work and they presented their work at the fair. They felt very happy because they created a good work on their own. Their aim was to create an idiom dictionary, but we did not have enough time for this. Therefore, they drew just a few idioms.

I gave just one example of being different and creative. If we try to be creative and do not be classical, I’m sure that we can be more helpful for our students and they really love English because of their teacher’s teaching way.

Here are some pictures of our project.

Click on images to enlarge.