Sunday 1 November 2009

Your Japanese word of the week is...

"yoku kangaeru" よく考える .  Yoku is actually an adjective in the sense that placing it in front of the verb represents "thoroughly" or "well done".  Kangaeru is the verb "to think" so putting them together sort of means to "really think about" or, in my case, "reflection".

People who have been or are in the B. Ed program may take a moment to laugh and/or gag at the word reflection, which is tossed around all the time in the program but it's a much less trivial thing to do while on practicum.

The first week of my practicum went quite well mostly because there wasn't much to go wrong.  I spent the bulk of the time going to various classes and observing teachers to see how they taught their subject, managed their students and time, and set up their classroom atmosphere.

The second week, however, was different.  Although I only had to teach 4 full classes, the planning took a fair chunk of time because I don't have much experience running a 75-min class of 30 students.  This means I have to consider what I'm doing for every minute as well as gauging how long it would take them to do things.

The hardest thing though was I felt one of my lessons didn't go that well.  The students were great and the majority of them got the material towards the end (and the next day, in the review class, they all aced it which was great) but I wasn't very happy with how I did what I did.  I thought I had rushed through the intro to an activity and that caused a lot of confusion partway through the class whereas what I should've done was eased into it more slowly, trading quantity of work done by some students for quality of work done by all students.

To be honest, I was quite frustrated with myself but the day after, after much careful consideration (note word of the week), I adjusted my approach and it went much better.  And while it's easy now to say that having a bad class is a useful if not necessary part of the learning experience, it was much much harder to dig myself out of that rut while being stuck in it.  And in an evening no less.

Perhaps I was too critical of myself on the day of, but ultimately, it helped me reach the next step.

In the meantime, it's back at UBC until the long practicum.  Also, one of my fellow student teachers took some great pictures of some amazing costumes and artwork around the school so once I get those, I'll throw them up =)

Speaking of costumes, the Halloween Dance went without a hitch.  As for all the teens bumping and grinding, we the chaperones just turned a blind eye heh....

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