Hamza Harrous

On November 22, 2019, we visited the Santiago Ramon y Cajal school. The purpose of the visit was to observe the different English teachers exercising their functions. Needless to say, we were received in very good ways.

However, the school is located in the neighbourhood of Hadú, exactly on Avenida José Santos Vilela s / n 51002 Ceuta.

Those of us from Ceuta, we know that it is one of the most populated neighbourhoods in the city and the socioeconomic level of its neighbours is medium-low. The main language of the students is Darilla since in that neighbourhood live Spanish people of Moroccan origin.

Now known the context in which teachers have to teach we can make an assessment of the observations we have made.

We begin our observation exercise at 9:00. We decided to separate into groups of two, so I had to go with Mohamed. We started with teacher Bea. We had a third grade in elementary school. It was a classroom composed of 22 students, which one of them had some kind of educational need.

The teacher started the session with a routine, but what caught my attention the most is that it was a routine that had nothing to do with English but with mathematics. Teacher Bea is both her teacher of English and mathematics, Spanish language and natural sciences. In this way, he has much more contact with students than any other teacher.

The grouping of the classroom is 5 groups of 4 students and 1 group of 5 people. They are distributed by roles such as spokesperson, critic, secretary.

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They worked with different games, those games were dominoes, xabum and boardgame.

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The other class was with Ruben. It was a sixth-grade classroom composed of 28 students. We started class at 9:50 with a routine. The routine consisted of students explaining in English how they feel, the days of the week, sensations ...

The activity of that day was a Boardgame composed of phrases and images. It worked the action verbs, such as play, watch, do, like .... also the pronouns, my, his, her and finally the singular and plural of the verbs.

Something that caught my attention is that in the class there was a girl from Morocco, so she presented a very large curricular gap. Ruben worked with her in a special way. I used the tablet to learn the words through the ear and with the application of games.

To sum up, as I commented with my colleagues, I had a somewhat negative vision about the school, but when I visited it and saw firsthand the work that teachers and especially Ruben did, I understood that it is not appropriate to judge, without before know him.