Wednesday, October 17, 2012

My pupil saved my LESSON





             ''In teaching others we teach ourselves.'' (Proverb)

I would like to share with you this anecdote about an embarrassing situation I had , last year, in class. While preparing the lesson, the whole anecdote flashed through my head and as the title suggests one of my pupils saved my lesson by using her cell phone, which was directly connected to the internet.


As a matter of fact, I am indebted to Mariem for saving my lesson because she has got much savvy. The lesson was a listening lesson revolving around Celine Dion's song "Immortality" and as usual I saved the song on a USB flash drive and on my laptop! I thought I was well-prepared for the lesson! I thought: I am "armed" with two files of the song, so there's no risk! One is an mp3 file and the other is a mp4 file, a video downloaded from YouTube with the lyrics of the song! I have the portable mini speaker with its USB charger. Everything seemed in order!


Nonetheless, I was not ready for a power outage!!! What added insult to injury was that my laptop was out of charge! OMG!!!


You cannot imagine to what extent this situation drew my ire especially when I detected the disappointment in my learners' eyes! I tried to save the situation by postponing the listening to a later session and asked them to use the already taught vocabulary to write a free essay. To my amazement, a diligent , techie girl: Mariem suggested she would download the song via her cell phone, which was connected to Internet.


Therefore, I expressed my great thankfulness because she'd save our lesson.Within few minutes, we listened to the song and carried on the lesson. I was not the only person who expressed her gratitude to Mariem, many of her classmates did!


From that day on, I knew how important is new technology to teaching! My techie pupil saved me. She taught me a good lesson that day and I am still grateful to her. This anecdote made me so eager to embrace more and more new inventions in the field and adapt them to my classroom. Cell phones, usually are banned inside the class! However, cell phones could be of great utility in our classes especially with the limitless number of free applications available on the web!