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My social service was an opportunity to explore a field which I had never been involved before. It made me appreciate even more all the work that the administrative staff at a school has to conduct. I worked directly with the students’ tutor, who is the direct responsible of having school records in order, and with the school’s principal.

The development of my social service was not always smooth. Working on most the activities in the program was not a problem. What it was the most difficult was finding the time to actually conduct those activities that I had to conduct in my receiving institution. Sometimes the schedules did not coincide, and there was no opportunity to get together, the administrative staff and me. Anyway, we managed to put it together almost at due date.

In short, my social service showed that sometimes the students’ inappropriate behavior in an academic environment is allowed by the teachers’ decision making process and knowledge of the school rules. In other words, if teachers do not know exactly what the rules and consequences of not following them are, they might fail to make the best decision in terms of writing a report for the students’ bad behavior.  Also, there are occasions when teachers do not report a student, they prefer having a short informal chat with them to make them reflect on what they have done. Although this might improve rapport between students and teachers, there is no official register of the students’ inappropriate behavior. This can make implementing the schools’ rules more difficult because there is no registered evidence such as a report to justify any school measure.

There is too much to keep working on concerning the students’ behavior in academic environments. I consider this experience as the tip of the iceberg for me. I am sure that if I continued working on this matter, it would take me a long time to reach concrete conclusions concerning the reason why students sometimes behave in certain ways which do not seem to be the best. All in all, I feel this was an opportunity to look inside another part of my profession which can help me make better decisions when reporting a student.