It's been a while since I started teaching. I grew up in Jeddah. After completing my bachelors I started looking for a job. Not able to find a good one I decided to become a teacher, although I had never planned on becoming one. I wanted to be a journalist but now I feel teaching is the right job for me. Anyway, my reason for being a teacher was because I love kids. I loved the idea of showing kids how to write and read. I've always felt I had a natural talent to engage and train them. I remember my first day in nursery. I was so excited on my first day; I had crying and naughty kids all around me. Everything went well as I had planned. However, I'll never forget the moment when the clock struck 12:30 and the day finally came to an end. When I looked at my desk it was full of sheets. I sat on my chair, took a deep breath and wondered, “Do I really have to read all that?” The quantity of those worksheets surprised me on my first day. With time I managed and I vowed to make the class interesting with exciting topics and beautiful rhymes. If I sensed boredom, I would try to do something to knock off my students' socks because it is my responsibility to keep them engaged. Since I teach at the nursery level, my students continue to teach me every day. I devote a great deal of my time teaching and I am never bored with my kids. To be a successful teacher, I constantly remind myself of the following: Students are humans too; they make bad decisions and mistakes; they want to have fun; and they want to be treated with respect and dignity. I believe time management is a very important key because teaching takes time whether it is in school or elsewhere; there's never enough of it. Like an executive responsible for his subordinates, you will find that managing your time and the students' becomes one of your biggest challenges. Time management is the thread running through almost all aspects of teaching; organizing the day, organizing the classroom, deciding how long and how often to teach different subjects/topics, recording student progress, or keeping time-consuming problems to a minimum. Effective use of school time begins with efficient classroom organization and management skills; paring down paperwork, planning and establishing routines that eliminates wasting time and confusion, using learning centers, independent assignments, seat work to give you time to work with small groups, creating classroom environments that allow students to move smoothly from one activity to the next. With all the hard work, it is an amazing experience to watch them grow from childhood to adulthood. This is what keeps me going. I love passing my knowledge onto others even if it is one kid out of one hundred.
