When things go wrong in class

The situation that I had to face was "The class went out of control".

It was something that I could never imagine. First of all, every time that I went to the school to teach my students, the class was always awesome with me. The first month was great. The children were very excited since the very beginning, and I realized that my teaching practicum was going to be good. I noticed the good reaction of my students when I explained to them the program and when I told them that I was going to be their teacher.

All the students started doing many things like shouting, jumping and running, and actually some of them ran to hug me and said: "we want to learn English." Obviously my reaction was good, and I had to smile and tell them "we are going to learn together". As I said, the first month was great. I could teach to my students different topics. They were nice because they worked a lot and in a very good way. I was happy. Every single time that I went to the school I felt secure and more able to do my job.

When I was almost finishing the teaching practicum, the class went in a negative way because I saw some students making a lot of troubles in the classroom. A girl had already finish the activity I gave her, and she asked me if I could give her another page to color. When I gave her the page, another girl asked me one as well and the other girl got mad because they didn't like each other.
The first girl grabbed the page and shattered it, leaving all the little pieces on the floor. I felt very angry, but I kept my horses and just told her to go to her seat, but the girls started fighting. It was the last class when that happened, and I had to catch their attention and try to keep the situation under control, but I could not. They continued making troubles and they made disasters. All lose the control of the whole class and besides that, the two girls fighting were an internal disturbance. I felt bad because that happened to me in the last class. After some minutes, I could keep the class calm and quiet, and the two girls stopped fighting.

Well, talking about the tips in chapter 8, I did not put into practice any of them, but it is a fact that if I would have taken one of them, specially the seventh one that says "You can sometimes sit back and observe what´s going on instead of planning the next activity in your head", I would had a total control of the class. Not only while the students were working, but also when they finished the activity, for I would be prepared and confident to develop another activity or adapt my lesson if there were another problem in the classroom. Also, I could have taken advantage of the second tip on the book, to take the two girls fighting aside and talk to them in private, avoiding the whole class to get distracted.

At the time of the problems, I didn't know how to react, but I know my teaching practicum would be very different if I had put them into practice,