Assignment Nicol Smith

My name is Nicol Smith. My VISE I workshop experience was at Lorenzo Luzuriaga School which is located in Cerro O’Higgins in Valparaiso. It is an elementary mixed school. The school is really humble and small and it had no more than 160 students at the time, I don’t know how many are now. The building wasn’t big enough for all the students they had, which is why from 1st grade to 4th grade were in pairs (NB1 and NB2). From 5th grade to 8th grade were separated but they shared some subjects aswell, like English, Music, etc. Though I never understood how they managed to separate the grades for Math and Spanish classes and not for every class. One thing I remember very well was the first day, obviously because it was my first impression about being in a school in a different way, not being a student but something else. That day the teacher explained to me the contents that she was teaching to the students of 7th and 8th grade. She also excused herself because the contents actually weren’t for students for those grades but for lowers. She said the students had a really bad base in English and because of that, she started with almost the basics. The first 15 minutes of the class, they spend it in silent reading, although they did anything instead of reading. They started talking to the teacher, playing football with a ball made of paper. And when the time of starting the class came. No one wanted to do something, I remember I heard a comment that it said something like this: “Miss let’s not have classes today” and another student said, following his classmate opinion, “Yeah, like in music class, let’s throw flour to ourselves”. I wondered why were the students so unwilling to learn? Probably because the weren’t motivated with the subject. They never saw anything interesting in the subject, therefore that is why they resort to play and being talkative. What could I do to not let it happen to me in the future? Applying new techniques, making something fun out of teaching, researching new ways of teaching and using all sorts of thing that would improve or help the process of learning . How? Using technology as an ally in order to call their attention. Because technology is something necessary and something kids manage really well these days.