Learning Contexts!

Something I found appealing from Describing learning contexts was schools and class size. I personally relate one to each other. I have not had the experience of teaching in a public school.  Public school tend to have really large classes where focusing on the needs of the students is practically impossible. 

In our society, public schools have lack of resources such as good chairs, new facilities, cutting edge technology resources and so on.  On this particular environment, from my point of view, teaching becomes a real challenge.  On the other hand comes the background of students and it is not secret that most of them come from hearths where social problems are an everyday matter. When having a class of 30 or even 50 students coming from many different social strata is hard to keep the interest on the class extremely difficult. 

On my personal opinion the teacher is not only the teacher but also the friend, the guide, even the psychologist because one must be prepared for any kind of situation that arises in the classroom.  The teacher has not only one but several roles on this particular case.   

Classes like this big demands a lot from the teacher. A teacher in this situation must have a great number of techniques to maintain order and the flow of the class in its right course.

Harmer presents a list of key elements to take into account when teaching large classes and my favorites are maximize group/pair work and use students for example as monitors of the groups. In this way the teaching and instructing is minimized and teachers become more guides rather than the person always in front of the students giving a “boring” lecture.