My time as a teacher at Máximo Trueba has taught me a great deal about how to be a more effective teacher, however I also had some prior experience teaching before beginning my current position as an Auxiliar.

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     My first experience working in a teaching position was as a teaching assistant during my sophomore and junior years of college.  I was a TA for an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) certification course at Indiana University, and this role had various responsibilities.  I guided students in practicing EMT skills, helping to demonstrate proper ways to perform the skills needed to gain the EMT certification.  I also helped to administer practical exams, and assisted with organizing the classroom based portion of the class.

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     During my junior and senior years at Indiana University I gained experience teaching one on one and in small groups through a tutoring position at the athlete academic center.  I primarily tutored students in chemistry classes, however I also worked with students on Spanish and algebra.  My time working as a tutor taught me how to adapt my teaching approach according to the student's needs and learning style.  It is extremely important to adjust the approach taken to student learning depending on the way the student learns best, and this job showed this to me firsthand.

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     While I was working as a tutor at Indiana University, I also held a position in a student organization that allowed me to create and give presentations on a weekly basis.  The organization is called Timmy Global Health, and has the focus of fighting healthcare disparities in our partner clinic in Guatemala, and in the local community through various avenues such as fundraisers, medical supplies donation drives, volunteering in local clinics and food pantries, and a yearly trip to Guatemala to work in our partner clinic.  My position required me to create presentations on healthcare related topics for weekly meetings, and I gave these presentations to groups of 10-50 people depending on the type of meeting we were holding that week.  My goal with these presentations was not only to inform the audience on the weekly topic, but also to facilitate discussions and, at times, debates.  I gained a great amount of comfort with addressing large groups thanks to this position, and I learned a lot about how to keep people interested and engaged.

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     These prior teaching experiences gave me a great base of knowledge to begin working as an Auxiliar, however I have also been constantly learning and honing my teaching skills throughout this year.  Learning how to be the most effective teacher I can be is an ongoing and ever-evolving process.  Every day I learn more about what students do and do not respond well to, how individual students learn best, and the best ways to manage different classrooms.

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     My teaching experience at Máximo Trueba has been very positive, although there are aspects of the position that are different than what I expected coming into the program.  All of the teachers that I work with are extremely supportive, and I feel as though I generally have an appropriate level of responsibility.  I have opportunities to prepare lessons and run the entire class more or less on my own, and there are also days when I take a more typical assistant role and the teacher is the primary instructor.  It all depends on the class and what we need to cover on that particular day.  My experiences with how the classroom is run, and the teacher student interactions is what took me a little by surprise.  The students in my school tend to be far more talkative that what I am used to from my experience in school, and this took some getting used to.  The teacher-student relationship is also generally slightly more relaxed here in Spain compared to in the United States.  One way this different dynamic is manifested is that students address teachers by their first names.  This is just one example of the difference in the relationship between teachers and students, but I feel it is a good representation of the different rapport that exists.