My First Teaching Experience

I had my first teaching experience while I was doing my military service in Hakkari, a province in the South East of Turkey. I was assigned to teach philosophy, psychology (I have a Bachelors degree in the former field) to a group of 40 adults who were aged between nineteen to twenty five in a Turkish military dersane. The classes were voluntary for the students who attended the classes in an attempt to better prepare themselves for the university entrance exam. I was quite nervous and uneasy on my first day because of two main reasons; the fact that I had never taught earlier in my life and the scary thought of dealing with forty adults. With this in mind and heart, I started the class by taking the attendance which took up the first five minutes of the lesson followed by a brief introduction about myself and what the lessons would involve and asked students if there were any further questions they wanted to ask related to these. Students stated that they did not have any questions. I did not want to lose any time so I wrote some of the key terminologies related to that days topic on the board and I asked students to discuss their possible meanings in groups of four for five minutes; I did this brainstorming activity to find out the students familiarity with the topic. When they were finished with the activity I asked them to compare their assumptions with each other and discuss them. Responses from students included various answers with some partly correct and some totally incorrect. To solve this problem, I gave students a worksheet which had the key terminologies as well as their definitions and asked students to match them in their previous groups. I observed that this time students did this task easily and correctly and when they needed help, I provided it. Now that the meaning of some key terminologies were understood, I showed students pictures of some great philosophers of the twentieth century such as Jean Paul- Sartre, Nietzsche, Keirkegaard and asked for their names. Students told me that they had no idea because they never saw any pictures of philosophers before. However, when I told them their names they informed me that they had heard of them in their previous lessons in high school. I did this activity because I wanted to help the students to see images of philosophers they very often heard about yet never saw. The following task to which I assigned the students was to match the definitions in pairs with philosophers who coined them. Majority of the pairs did this task successfully. To elaborate on the topic, I asked the students to open 1

their books and read the relevant chapters in their books to find out the various similarities and differences amongst the philosophers on the topic of existentialism. When they finished the activity, I asked them to compare their answers with their peers and ask me any questions about which they have different opinions. To find out how students felt about the topic, I asked them to discuss their own ideas on the topic; whether they thought it was plausible or too deep. Responses varied from the topic being very relevant to ones life to the idea that philosophers were very bored and wanted to come up with new topics of interest for common people to discuss. Finally, when I asked learners how they thought the lesson went they told me that it was different from other lessons they had in their earlier lessons primarily because they were more active as opposed to being a passive listener. Upon hearing this, I have really been feeling different and I think that is why I would like to learn more about teaching.