Ready after my first class

The first day was really interesting. I went there and I did not really know what to expect. My professor made it even worse for me; she scared me that our adult learners will not understand anything of what we say. To accommodate that I was really prepared for explaining whatever I say with drawings and pictures. However, the situation was not that bad, it was much better than what we have expected. The learners understood almost everything we were saying. They were so out spoken. I really liked how they are so keen to learn and how they understand the value of what we are doing. They were so active in class. They broke so many communication barriers between us. They really made our life easier. I did not feel that they were adult learners at all; they were just normal students, just like us. We were almost at the same level although the age group was quite diverse. The adult learner’s age group ranged from 53 to 20 years. Their passion for learning motives us to give them more and put more effort.

The first class helped us so much recognize what could work for the leaners and what could not. It also helped us recognize what areas of improvement we need to work on for ourselves and for the learners as well. For instance, we thought that we will be coordinating between ourselves really well. However this was not the case in the class, we were stepping on each other foot most of the time. To solve this issue we met as a group and agreed on a new strategy to avoid this problem from happening again. In addition to that improvement, we are also changing the level of our teaching dramatically. We are going to teach much harder stuff and will give our learners more content. This problem rose because we were prepared to teach something really basic, but the class level turn out to be much higher than what we expected. This means that we should teach them something they are interested in, some new for them, not something they already know and this part is kind of tricky for us. Because the level of knowledge is pretty diverse among our group of learners. If we teach something hard the less knowledgeable people will not understand anything and will be lost. On the other hand, if teach something easy the more knowledgeable people will be bored and try to do something else or they might even leave the class, because they are not learning anything. This, tricky, part is not easy to deal with, so we are still considering various solutions to this problem such as switching students between different classes or putting them in balanced mixed groups so that they can learn for each other’s and no one gets bored or lost.

I believe that there is no secret recipe or easiest shortcut to solve this kind of problems. If the secret recipe exists then all of our teachers should be good teachers. However, it does not exist, each teacher creates his own recipe according to his students and that is what we are trying to do. It is not easy, actually it is quite challenging, but we are up for it. We should always put this in mind, they are the best learners ever, but are we the best teachers ever?