It’s the end!
And it’s happy and sad. Happy because there’s finally a break but sad to be leaving such a nice school. I’ve had the best mentor teachers and learned more about teaching in these four weeks than my whole uni teaching degree. From what I hear, this is a common sentiment among student teachers.
This week I gave my year 8s a quiz on algebra in which they all did terribly. This was a surprise to me because they aren’t a bad class. They’re all switched on and don’t have any serious misbehavior. I knew the problem was with me and I think it was my expectations of work to be completed.
I could set them on task and they’ll work through it slowly with minor chatter. I thought that was the norm for year 8s. Some kids sit quietly and fly through the work and are soon asking for more. Others need help. On Thursday I tried to be a little bit more assertive with my expectations of being quiet and working hard to complete as much work as possible at the start of the lesson and every student got through much more work than I previously thought possible for them. This focused work time compressed the range of time taken for students to complete work.
The last few weeks I have been too passive with them. I think it’s because it took some time before I felt like they were my students, not my mentor’s students. In this last week, I’ve really enjoyed teaching them. In my last lesson with them, I taught them about the shape of a wing and why we have an airfoil shape with a hands on demo. They really liked that. For the rest of the lesson, I had my RC plane with autopilot circling above the oval and the students were able to look around with my goggles and head tracker.
That lesson was far out of the curriculum, but I think it’s good for the students to be exposed to something different. Aerial mapping drones have strong science roots and are an emerging industry that students could get involved with in the Riverland if they want to put in the effort to learn.
Overall, I’m very satisfied with my placement and feel much better prepared to take on the next one.