INT SCHOOL - DAY
Hours 39-36

First week in class with Miriam's 3rd ESO students. There are 13 students in class, 4 girls and 9 boys, and I still have to meet one more, who has not attended these classes.
I have to say that in the whole they behave quite well, even though they are sometimes talkative. In spite of this, Miriam always manages to call for their attention. In this sense, students respect her role as a teacher. On the last session I even helped her when those seated around me got distracted.

I took notes on the general dynamics of the class, which include class interactions and materials used and from this I guess I can more or less have an idea of how the class is intended to work in order to accomplish with the curricular objectives. I'm glad to see that Miriam uses a lot of ICT activities and that she promotes communicative activities rather than asking them to write down every single exercise presented in class. I mean most of them are resolved orally making students participate, sometimes spontaneously others when directly asked to. I really appreciate the great amount of time Miriam spends preparing these exercises, searching on the net for those exercises that best suit the topic she is dealing with, and therefore she uses a great variety of them to work all areas of language learning. At the moment they are working with physical descriptions and I can say that on the last session they were finally able to write a short description of the pictures they had to bring to class as homework. They got them from magazines and the ones who didn't were given one by Miriam from a magazine that one of the students brought into class. On the last session, when they were writing the descriptions, I walked around trying to help them, and they accepted this naturally, asking me for words and allowing me to check their sentences and suggest changes. I am very happy about this first week with them and I hope everything goes on like this and I soon get integrated in the classroom dynamics as one more member of the group.

I'd like to make a special mention of the "tutoria" class I attended, since Miriam is also the tutor of this 3rd ESO class. Here Miriam planned to project the film Real Women have Curves for a later discussion of it. We had only time to watch an hour of the film, which they seem to follow quite well, bearing in mind that some parts are even in Spanish, and the rest was subtitled. I am eager to know what they think of the problems encountered by the main character, Ana, and how they would solve them. I think this would let me know them deeper and see how they manage to express themselves on social and cultural issues. I'll tell you!

El cocinero nos da lecciones de Spanglish