"Miss..What Should I do in This Number?"

Sequence cards/pictures

Hollaaa.....if you read this note, it means you read my old one that i repost again. 

I wanna share my opinion about how to handle students who keep raising hands asking for helps during tests. Many interruptions arise during the test, either asking about the meaning of words, asking about what to do, or asking about something that actually is clearly can be seen in the test paper.  For sure, as a teacher we want to help them, although sometimes in the end we find out that actually they can solve their own problems. I always remind my students to read the instruction very well and I myself, always try to make the instruction as simple as I can, especially I am dealing with the lower level students. For the 1st graders, I help them to read some difficult words and paraphrase them, when they can not read fluently yet. Sometimes, I found this kind of question ;

"Miss..what should I do in this number?" 

I asked him to read the instruction loudly and asked him back with the same question, and he actually knew what to do. So, actually, he just needed a confirmation or affirmation from the teacher. 

When this happens to you, you do not need to get panic and start to blame yourselves that maybe your language in the instruction or the question is too much complicated for them. It is about confidence and independency. There are some ways to improve student's confidence and independency. First, by improving his problem - solving skills and his logical thinking. Is there anyway to train this in daily basis? Yes. I am a language teacher, during my lesson with the 1st graders, I used sequence pictures to trigger them to talk. No Bahasa Indonesia. So, if they did not know how to say a word, they would use a body language or they would whisper in my ears and I would tell them what's the English word, then they have to repeat it. So, the pace of teaching and learning with this kind of rule was really a slow motion pace. However, believe me that it works really well. So, when it came to the picture, they would learn many vocabularies and also improve the logical/critical thinking as well. I used WH questions and I ended up with "What do you think will happen if ....?" Then I would get a very lively class, though they speak with broken English. This kind of class will be fruitful although the pace is quite slow, but this is the point of learning a foreign language; enjoying the learning pace. 

Getting back to the classroom, during test, sometimes I had an intention to ignore them if they kept asking me the same questions. So, they would learn not to depend to the teacher too much. Well, when a teacher is mean, it doesn't mean that she is really mean. 

2010