Kai Carpenter

C&T 491

Dr. Cho and Johnson

25 June 2019

Critical Incident Reflection

The most the important incident that has happened during my time here at Kyunghwa

Girls’ High School was while Patrick and I were teaching our first lesson about describing

people, it was during the middle of the week and during the activity where we had the students

describing images of celebrities and their partner had to draw them in order to practice the forms

and vocabulary that we had taught them. After they finished their drawings, we had them stand

in front of the class, read their sentences about the drawing, and then show the drawing and have

the other students guess who it was that they had drawn. In my free time during the week I had

been making origami frogs and during this lesson I decided that anyone who could correctly

guess the celebrity would get one. I decided to do this because in the classes before, the students

had not been very energetic during this part of the lesson, so I felt that they need a prize or

motivation for this part in order to practice more.

After introducing the paper frogs, the students became a lot more attentive in the class

and trying to actively guess the celebrities that their classmates had drawn, even jumping up to

give the answer. The reason that I have chosen this as the critical incident to do a reflection on is

because I felt that this moment helped solidify one of the reasons that I want to teach English in

the first place. Which is to help students learn something that they are truly interested in and
watching them get excited over something even as simple as origami frogs made me excited and

made me want to teach English even more that before.

Before I had given the students any of the paper frogs, I assumed they would like them,

but not be crazy excited, but after the class they we excitedly talking about the frogs with their

friends and how much they loved them. Their excitement so pure and cute that it helped me feel

accomplished about teaching English even over the brief period while being here.

Overall this incident just helped me confirm that after I graduate, teaching English as a

foreign language in other countries than America is something that I really want to do.