A reflection...

Do you remember the first days at Teacher Training College? I do. To start with, I remember coming to Rosario to live on my own with a friend in order to attend the pre-entrance exam courses. Then, I remember how excited and happy I felt after passing that exam. I had never imagined that the course of studies was going to be as demanding, exhausting and time consuming as it has been.

We´ve had the chance to meet a lot of people during these years: teachers, peers, class teachers in different schools, lots of students we´ve observed and practiced with. We´ve also learned lots of things which I guess none of you would have expected to learn: from those cultural details we´ve studied in Social Studies to the analysis of a text from a discourse analysis perspective and from an ideological perspective as well; from analyzing word by word of a sentence, underlining its subject, verb, object, modifier, etc., to learning how the mind works and how to make teaching (and learning) meaningful; from how to plan a lesson perfectly to dealing with those unexpected problems lots of us have faced during the practice period.

And now that the course of studies is coming to its end –or at least that is what papers say- our responsibility it too heavy. In the first place, we have to graduate. As I said last class, we have a further responsibility with ourselves to be persevering and conscientious enough to finish studying on our own; we have to be hard-working enough to finish the final works on our own, too; we don´t have to lose contact with the institution we´ve been studying during these years, with teachers or with peers.

We´ve always waited for this moment to come, we´ve always waited for the moment in which we could start working after having the degree, we´ve always waited for the moment in which we could say we are TEACHERS. Those moments are about to come and we have to be ready for that new period in our lives. Most importantly, we have to be ready to do our job the way we´ve been taught to do it, we have to be ready to face new situations each day either at a school or at an institute, we have to be ready to prove that we know how to do our job.

Finally, I´d like to ask you if you remember how our Language lessons were like at the beginning of the year. Do you remember we all wanted to read every single answer we had? Do you remember how competitive the group was? Do you remember that talk the teacher gave us the third lesson? I´m sure you remember that. And I´m also sure that you feel things have changed throughout the year, or at least that is the way I see it. I feel we´ve felt more comfortable and freer after that talk and after changing the seating arrangement, I feel we´ve all had a role to play during the lessons and I feel we´ve all understood how important listening to others is. It was great to have discussions, to have the opportunity to prepare presentations, to read lots of texts which, even though they have represented lots of hours of hard work have been a very useful tool to learn vocabulary, expressions and to develop our ability to understand texts, haven´t they? I´ve really enjoyed our Language lessons and I dare say I´ve enjoyed them more than any other year at teacher training.

Dear peers and dear teacher/s, it´s been a pleasure to share so many things with you and to get to know you. I wish you the best of luck, and I hope to see you around.

Here is a gift for all of you:

Teacher: Now, give me the opposite of this sentence: “Children in the dark make mistakes.”
Juan: Mistakes in the dark make children.

Always remember that, as the saying goes, “to teach is to touch a life forever”.