School Experience III

Okie now's more people are falling sick...its so terrible. Now instead of just observing the classes, I need to teach those classes. One of the Econs tutor whom I'm attached to is on MC, so I had to take over all her classes. In total, I conducted three econs tutorial in one day. The fortunate thing is that the tutorials are TYS MCQ questions sessions. But there are still stuff to be learnt.

Here are some points:
(1) Don't just know how to explain the right answers. Think about how to explain why the incorrect answers are wrong too. (esp for MCQ).

(2) Handwriting. I just don't like my handwriting on the board! well on paper it looks fine to me; but when I gotta write stuff on the board and quickly too, its just not what I like. Anyway, I'll try to improve on that. =)

The week-long school experience is over (at last!). Its rather tiring actually.. kindda physically drained each day. Anyway, the weekend is here! Yeppie!

School Experience II - The real stuff!

Today is my third day at AJ and guess what? my geog CT is on MC!! Hence this means that I have to take her tutorial classes!

As i mentioned in my previous posting, the JC1s are at the optional topic which I am totally clueless about. Luckily, Mrs Ong just requested for me to facilitate the session and not teach! phew!

Anyway, gave myself a crash course on the S. America and Africa deserts in about an hour and there I went. The class was actually not bad as I conducted the session outside the classroom (i.e at the benches along the corridor). Think its because they were out of the classroom so they are not bored. Conducted the session fairly nicely with three groups. However, I felt that I was conducting some game show like 'amazing race' or some reality show. Why? I did a 'JIGSAW'-like method for the groupwork so I had to regroup them. The issue is that there were three groups of 4, 5 and 6 students. They have their 'home' groups but I had to regroup them into groups of five. But I do not know all their names so I had to number them. After sorting it out and thinking that I was correct, I allocated each 'home' groups with 'new members'. Then comes the funny thing...I still had three groups of 4, 5, and 6 students! It was all so impromptu.

As for the second class, there were only 9 students. So the task was much easier. However, the problem now is with the content! Since they finished their task earlier, they started asking me questions like "Why is the Sahara desert much bigger than the rest?","What are the directions of all the tradewinds?" and "How come the rainshadow effect is different for two deserts in the S. America? HEY!! I only had an hour of crash course and it was self-study. I tried to look cool and kindly diverted their attention by letting them have a little 'compeition' in class. geez..

Anyway these are some points that I learnt from my classes today:

1) Never arrange to meet your students outside the classroom if you have not met all or most of them before.

2) Try to remember as many names as possible (even if its just one session). It helps!

3) It is really useful to have timekeepers in the groups.

School Experience

Here are some of my reflections on the school experience.

Today is the second day in school and I've already had a feel of busy it can get. There seems to be countless administrative work for the staff, aside for the lesson planning. It seems that most of the teachers in AJ are pre-occupied with non-teaching related tasks. I really wonder if all these non-teaching stuff can be made simpler or at least less of a burden.

The teachers are AJ are really friendly, especially the new teachers. I feel comfortable in their company. They are helpful in terms of coaching and clarifying my doubts.

However, I was kindda lost in the geography tutorial class! The teacher is currently covering the optional topics: semi-arid and desertification. And i'm quite clueless about what's going on in class. I'm okay with the Sahara deserts.. but when it came to the south american deserts...oh my gosh. Anyway, teaching in a JC seems very content-heavy. There is hardly time to try out the theories, e.g. constructivist or collaborative learning. I came upon this survey done by the students and they actually rate ZERO for the use of group skills in their lessons.

Three more days to go. I think there is still a lot more to learn and hopefully i'll be able to absorb as much as possible.

Micro-teaching

It looks like class management can be really challenging. I'm not sure how much of the micro-teaching we had are really authentic and I'm sure the pointers we learnt will be, in some way, applicable in the future. Thanks to all who had planned such wonderful lessons.

I have kindda regretted choosing weathering as my topic for micro-teaching. Seems rather dry, i mean we are talking about rocks & stones here. It'll be quite hard to make the issue applicable to real life. Anyway, I will have to do some reseaching to get some ideas soon.