Anecdote

                                   An anecdotal report from the diary of a teacher

If I am asked to share a challenge that I faced during my teaching in the classroom environment, I would most probably say that classroom management issue is the biggest problem I have faced till now. When I look at the past, especially at my internship teaching experiences, I see that everything does not work just as you think before. In other words, although we prepare ourselves with wonderful lesson plans previously, we even write some expected problems on those lesson plans, there are always appearing some unexpected of unexpected problems in the classroom. Namely, things don't work out as one calculates in the classroom and these things were generally management related ones for me.

As I stated in this blog in the earlier posts, in my internship year, in the spring term, I went to Atatürk Anatolian High School as an intern student. My students were 15-16 years old and the class size was 32 students totally. In my first teaching in that class, I noticed that only boys were participating to my lesson while girls were just sitting passively and examining me, my clothes, my walking around the desks. Whatever I did in order to have the girls participate to my lesson did not work out that day effectively. So, when the time for my second teaching came, I was a bit intimidated because I knew that even though I had planned beforehand and wrote to the lesson plan that students would do so in this activity, they would not do exactly what I want them. So when I went into the classroom for my second teaching, this time I was both afraid of happening the same thing and determined to attend to all students.

Coming to the second teaching day, when I first jumped into the board at the very beginning of the lesson, when I asked some warm up questions, again boys answered my questions but girls did not care about them at all. So, in order to have them participate, I started to tell some kind of girlish stuff so that I can take their attention. By doing so, I should accept that I took the first pace for reaching to the girls. Then, as the lesson goes on, I always played for the girls; try to attract them because boys were already continuing to participate the lesson. In that day, I also understood that it was not about me, the successful ones in that classroom were boys, and also in the mentor teacher’s classes, the girls generally did not participate to the lessons. Hence, actually, trying to attend to the girls would be also contributing to the future classes of the mentor.

Regarding of the solution to the problem, as I expressed, from the very beginning of the classroom, I tried to attract girls’ attention, I created girlish situations, questions. I said that “We all make mistakes so do not afraid to do mistake.” So, I tried to encourage them to speak up in the classroom because it was so clear that there were boys’ dominance and when the girls do mistakes, they are generally mocked and they lose eagerness/ enthusiasm of course. So, as time goes on, I started to see some girls raising hands and then I felt that they were feeling freer to talk comparing to the previous lesson. So, here one more time , I saw that instead of just ignoring the ones who are not successful in the classroom environment and who are passive ones, by playing for them, by attending to them  also, by giving special need and care to them, we can , most of the time,