Journal 3: January 15, 2019

“Good Morning Miss”

It has not sunk in yet that today I am going to have my practice teaching here in Indonesia. It is such an unreal feeling and an experience of a lifetime. Today is the first day of going to our assigned school and meeting our teaching mentor. Under their guidance we will be able to teach these students and gauge as to what aspect of the teaching-learning process do we have to improve on.

It started with Pak Sae introducing us to the principal and thanking him for allowing us to do our practice teaching there. He introduced us to our mentor Ibu Neny and in return, she is the one who introduced us to her students. She teaches 2 grade levels, Grade 7 and Grade 9, and her co-teacher Pak Darso, teaches grade 8. Their English class usually runs for two hours from Mondays to Saturdays. We were oriented that the curriculum and the lesson plans were in Indonesian so we have to translate it to English. Ibu Neny offered that she would make a lesson plan in English and guide us with the curriculum for us to be able to make a lesson plan ourselves.

At first, the students were very hesitant to approach me. I think this is because of my more serious nature compared to others. I hope to change this impression of me as we go along the practice teaching experience. We were asked to observe one class in Grade 9 and one more class in Grade 7. In Grade 7B, they had a whole class, teacher-centered discussion on describing words and questioning was usually used as a formative assessment. Even when the given were easy words, the students still asked their teacher to translate It for them.

With this I was able to see the difference on how much emphasis our country puts in learning the English language compared to theirs. Usually in junior high, Filipinos have moved on from the rules of grammar and vocabulary acquisition to creating essays and conversing in almost straight English whereas in Indonesia they have just begun to learn the basics of the English language.