This week there is a growing feeling that this is about to end; the countdown has begun and soon the school placement will be over. What a pity! I am having a great time and learning a lot, and after having a taste of what being a teacher is like, I don’t want to leave.
I am happy with how the week went by. My second lesson with the storytelling for the fourth graders didn’t go that well, because the introduction to the story took too long. On the second story, I tried to get those students who usually don’t take part to participate, so I directed my questions to specific students, instead of opening them to the whole group. Since I picked the shyer students, they took much longer to answer, and we spent more time than the previous week in the pre-task phase. So now I know that I need to strike a balance between rhythm and wide participation. Other than that, it went down well. The whole group of students got involved in the two lessons and they took the tasks very seriously. I am very grateful and happy.
The pre-primary lessons were great this week. There is a group where the class atmosphere has been deteriorating in the past few weeks, so I decided to share with the 5-year-old students very clear objectives for the lesson yesterday, and it worked. I gave clear instructions regarding the activities we would do, and particularly about how I was going to mark the transition from one to the next, stressing the words I would use. I was pleased with the result, but we still need to work a bit more to set our routines.
I was also very happy with the way things went in the 4-year-old groups, particularly one of them. Besides modelling the main activity in the lesson (making a collage on a sheet with 8 pictures and their corresponding texts, to create a “dictionary” for the unit) using an example made by myself, this time I asked one of the students to come to the front and we went through all the steps together. Being more explicit than other times might have helped some of the students, because one of them, who usually produces quite poor work, did wonderfully. He was so proud of his work that he kept walking around with it in his hands and didn’t want to collect it.
That incident got me thinking about diversity and high expectations. This particular student that I just mentioned comes from a family of immigrants; one can easily tell by the colour of his skin. Since I first got here he didn’t pay much attention in class, often he would be playing with objects around him or with the student next to him. He wasn’t tidy at all when it came to cutting and glueing or drawing, and he tended to do the minimum effort that would be allowed. I think I was told that he was like that, and I have to admit that I just accepted it. Yesterday he taught me a big lesson. It is easy to talk about highest expectations for all students, but it is much harder to apply that principle being honest and fair as a teacher. A teacher needs to be constantly questioning the opinions given by other and their own opinions, to see if they are honest and fair, or just based on prejudice. Always looking for what will prove them wrong, more than for what will prove them right.
iruzkinik ez:
Argitaratu iruzkina