With 18 years of teaching experience, Faria Khan has been able to decipher the specific problems students face when they are doing their Spanish oral CSEC examinations.
Seeing this, she said she decided to compile all the possible questions that may come up especially because there are no books like these.
“It came about two years ago when students in my online classes asked me, ‘Miss, why don't you put all of these notes in a book for us?’”
She uses six PowerPoint presentations to teach her students at her online Spanish oral crash course sessions.
“Kids want to take down all the notes, they don't want to take down just what they need, they want to take on everything and it's time-consuming and I found that we focused too much on the writing and less on speaking. So, I thought, okay, maybe if I put it in a book, they could study it and we can focus on the speaking.”
Khan said her inspiration also came from wanting to help students after seeing them struggle to recover their form one notes which are needed to prepare for their CSEC examinations.
She first thought of writing this book two years ago, but given the time constraints being a full-time teacher at ASJA Girls’ College, San Fernando, and having online sessions, she wasn’t able to publish the book sooner.
“I decided to work on it on my holidays, so it took a couple of July/August vacations and a couple of weekends in between and it was a really nice, fun project. I had the notes, but I wanted it to be covered extensively. I had about 220 questions when I finished the first draft and then I said, ‘No, I want when it goes out there that the topics are thoroughly covered.’ So, I held it back for another year and I added 30 more questions and that's how I got to 250 on six topics.”
Though she launched the book – CSEC Spanish Oral Conversation: Crash Course – on November 26, she has already received many positive reviews.
She said, “One of my students recently bought the book this week she said, ‘Miss, I love that all the notes are together because I can find all my different notes and whatnot.’ So that was one of the perks of it.”
Now that Khan is a self-published author, she said she realised it’s a completely different avenue to being a teacher despite using her teaching and research skills to bring her book to life. She said she even received help from other local textbook authors who would offer her advice and helped her a lot throughout her journey.
“I also found now I'm finding a little challenge because it's self-published. I am the one who has to now go to the bookstores and meet and liaise (with customers), so I've been doing that recently."
To those aspiring to be self-published authors, Khan told WMN that the process was easy to her as it’s what she was accustomed to – researching, compiling and getting what needs to be done on her own.
“Over the years, I create my own resources since I’m accustomed to creating my own PowerPoints and then with the online classes during covid19 was a huge learning curve. I found that when I
