My Vise 1

The school that i did my VISE 1 in is located in Cartagena, the city where I live in. The course was 4th grade. In the classroom were about 38 students and they belonged to the Cartagena’s community. When I came up in my first class with them the teacher explained them who I was and why I was there. The relation with the teacher was limited to the classroom, so I never had the opportunity to talk with her and establish a relationship with her. The event that marked me was when the teacher did not come into the school. One day I came into the school at 8 o’clock and she was not there, so I decided to wait for her, because the teacher of VISE1 told us that we never had stay in the classroom without the teacher. I was waiting and the inspector asked if I could get in charged of the course, and my first answer was not, but then I realised that there was nobody else to do that and I decide to do it. He did not give any resource to do activities so I had to improvise. When I get into the classroom the students were not in silence so I asked them to be quite, but they did not do it. So I started an exercise that was about words that they had to know. A few of them did the activity and the rest were talking and did not pay attention. Some of the girls were asking every five minutes to go to the bathroom, just to check if their make up was ok. So when I noted that I did not allow them to go there again. The three questions that emerge are: 1- Why did the inspector ask me, as a student, to be in charged of the class? I think it was because there was not a substitute English teacher, and that is because it is a public school and the school do not have enough money to hire more teachers. So in that moment the inspector did not need a teacher, he needed someone to control the students and keep them in the classroom. 2- Why were the students not interested in the class? The only explanation that I could find was their age. They were teenagers and they were in their last year, so the only thing they wanted was to finish school, besides the only activity that the teacher used to do was translation, so they never get interested in English. 2- Is there any possibility to make the students of 4th grade get interested in English classes? I think there is, but we have to have a way to connect them with the language, maybe if we can know what are they interested in, we will know what to talk about, and that way we will have the posibility