When things go wrong in class

By: Andrea Zaldivar

    In my teaching practicum, I had to face some difficult situations. One of these situations was that one day there was an internal disturbance in my class.

   I had assigned them one activity; the activity was about coloring a picture of a dog which was the animal that I taught them in that class. It was supposed that all of them were working on the activity, and I was monitoring that the students were developing the activity in the right way. Then I had to start checking that some of the students had already finished with the task. In that moment while I was distracted with the other kids, two of my students started to fight without any reason. I was really surprised with the situation because I had never faced something like that before, but I tried to keep calm. I interfered in the fight, but it didn’t work at all until I talked to them angry. Besides, they went to their sits and everything was okay. I felt kind of uncomfortable with the situation that I had to face in that moment, but my tutor told me that I didn’t have to feel in that way, something like that happens almost every day.

     There are some tips or recommendations that I could apply in order to solve that situation, but being the first time that I faced something like that in the classroom, I couldn’t think of the best way to stop it. Fortunately, it wasn’t that serious. Even I couldn’t apply some of the recommendations that we are supposed to know; I could handle and stop that awkward moment.