SEA-Teacher Charmaine

Aug. 15 –  THE STRUGGLES OF A FOREIGN STUDENT TEACHER           The time has come for me to take over the class. My topic was about the basic fundamental skills in Basketball. The class I was assigned to teach was in Grade 8G. About 85% of the students in the class couldn’t speak English and could only even understand a bit, while some really do not understand English.            In teaching Physical education, I am confident about bringing up the topic through physical actions, gestures and body language, especially in a school where English isn’t the medium of instruction. However, I couldn’t really fully depend with just gestures in teaching because we also need to wake their cognitive and affective aspect. Explaining to them the values of the lesson and communicating to them was very hard. But during my discussion, some of the English terms were familiar to them since some of it are close to their native ter...

Aug. 14 – LESSON PLAN MAKING On this day, I was still an assistant to Mr. Cece’s class because he hasn’t given me yet a topic to teach. After the class, he gave me his lesson plan. I need to continue his lesson, but I was a bit worried because his lesson plan was written in Indonesian language. To solve the problem, I downloaded an app called text scanner app and Indonesian-English translator app. The lesson plan was very thick because it was for 3 meetings. First, I took a photo of what’s written on the hardcopy using the text scanner app, then the text written on the hard copy immediately transferred to the phone as a soft copy, and so I directly copy-pasted it to the translator app and did a bit of corrections. I was able to create a lesson plan in English text following the Indonesian format. TEXT SCANNER APP OCR on Playstore INDONESIAN-ENGLISH TRANSLATOR APP ↭  SAMPLE LESSON PLAN in PE Basketball (I apologize for the low quality)

TEACHING ASSISTANT WEEK Aug. 12, 2018 SUNDAY – SABBATH DAY To start the week, Ivy and I went to a church in Bandung named St. Laurentius. Since we couldn’t understand the mass in Indonesian language, we decided to light a candle to Mama Mary after the mass and had a quiet moment for our personal intentions. ↞↠ Aug.13 – LESSON PLAN TRAINING This week is our Teaching assistant week, however, we haven’t been oriented about their lesson plan yet and so after our duty in SMP 3 Pasundan Junior high school, we had a lesson plan training at a Senior high school in Bandung. The training was led by an English teacher and he taught us the parts and processes of the Indonesian lesson plan. The only difficulty I found in their lesson plan was the core competency. Although the teacher said we can find these competencies on the syllabus, it’s still hard for me because it was all written in Indonesian text. Hence, we tried our best to create a lesson plan following the In...

Saturday August 11, 2018 CULTURAL VISIT TO KAWAH PUTIH! "Kawah Putih  (English:  White Crater ) is a striking  crater lake  and tourist spot in a  volcanic crater  about 50 km south of  Bandung  in  West Java  in  Indonesia ."  We also need to wear masks because of the strong smell of sulfur coming from the lake. Looks like winter, right? But it's just the  sand and rocks which have been bleached into whitish colours due to the interaction with the acidic lake waters (with possible mineral precipitation as well).(Wikipedia) ps: It's chilly in here, too. Sometimes, the temperature runs up to 10 degrees celsius. So better prepare your jackets when you visit here. The bestest place yet in Bandung, Indonesia! ♥♥♥♥

Day 6 Friday, August 10, 2018 Chapter 4 – EXPLORING BANDUNG, INDONESIA At 9:00 am in the morning, all of us were already dressed and prepared for school. Wondering why the car isn’t here yet, Ms. Elfina then called us. We were surprised with what she just said, “You have no schedule this Friday.” We were like wow we didn’t know that haha. Since it’s our free time, we asked Ms. Novi if we could go to the zoo, Ms said we could but then Mr. Yusuf the dean wouldn’t let us, because it was not on our schedule. However, Ms. Novi brought us instead to FKIP Unpas, The Education building of Universitas Pasundan. She treats us with Rujak, a street food made of mixed sliced fruits with a spicy and peanut-y sauce. I must say it is Bagus ! Good! While waiting for Pa Ujang to drive us back to our dorms, we played table tennis in one of the rooms of Education building.   When Pa Ujang fetched us home, we decided to go to some places in Bandung ourselves. We used a google ...

Day 5 Thursday, August 9, 2018 Chapter 3 – HOW TO UNDERSTAND INDONESIAN CLASSES OBSERVATION DAY 3 A new day has come. We were again introduced to Mr. Agus’ grade 9 class. We’ve never been to one of his classes before and so there goes another getting to know each other stage. Lots of photo ops and selfies happened. And I’ve noticed that their uniforms are cute! ❖❖❖ At 10:00 am, I was at Mr. Dede’s PE Class. He is also a PE teacher. Unfortunately, he can’t speak English therefore; I need to adjust with the situation. I need to recall the bahasa Indonesian words I’ve researched. As I was taking down notes about how his classroom routine and management works, I tried to stop writing for a moment and I can’t believe that I was able to understand his topic though he was speaking his native language. It was all in his body language and gestures. He was trying to recap their previous lesson and demonstrated the dribbling, types of passing and blocking. Thank God for ...

DAY 4 Chapter 2 – SEA zzz the day! Wednesday, August 8, 2018  2nd Day of my SEA STUDENT TEACHER JOURNEY It’s the same old morning routine with the 16 degrees celsius temperature and the verrrry cold wateeeer. 9:00 am.   HATUR NUHUN! (thank you in Sundanese), Pa Ujang! for always driving us from UNIVERSITAS PASUNDAN IV, Setiabudhi (ladies dorm) to PASUNDAN III and vice versa every day. ♡ ♡ ♡ As we arrived in SMP 3 junior high, Marc and I went straight to Mr. Cheche’s PE class to observe. On the picture shown above, they were doing warm ups and foot works on their quadrangle to give them a boost for the whole duration of the lesson. ♡ ♡ ♡ At 10:00 am in the morning, I went to observe Mr. Ahmad’s Culture and Arts class. Their topic was about techniques in drawing figures. They draw flowers, duck and etc. In Mr. Ahmad’s class, they used an overhead projector so that the lessons are clear for everyone. And at 10:40 to 12:00, I was again a...