Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Monday 16/06/08
Prac Block Day Twenty-Five

The last week! Hooray! Today started with Japanese and my kankyou class. I had them work on sentence structures again and had them write it down to start with. They still seem to not be able to get how to rearrange the sentences completely, but they are doing loads better. Also, they are getting heaps better at their particle use and are putting them in almost everywhere! Hooray!

After this I let them work on their own stuff. Quite a few of them are nearly done, but I think it will still take a bit to have them all finished by next Friday. I wrapped them up 15 mins early and did a quick revision of their kanji again. They have their test on Friday and I want them to do well. Most of them know the meanings and almost all of the pronunciations so that’s good. I hope they do well on Friday.

Next we had maths with Boat F – noise level 10/10, working productivity 0/10. It was a struggle to get the students to do work. I sat down with some of the struggling ones today and worked with them on the first question in their booklets!! How could they have done two whole weeks of work – four lesson – and not even done the first question?! Outrageous!

It was a similar story in Boat E after morning tea. I separated a group of girls because they weren't doing anything, but they snuck back together. My supervising teacher said I should have told her sooner because that's a deliberate disobedience to a teachers request and it’s one that you usually get sent to the office for. I’m more worried about the amount of time those students wasted instead of doing their work. How does anyone in this school pass grade 11 and 12 if they haven’t done the grade 8, 9 and 10 work??

After Maths, I had music last lesson. The students were working on their compositions in the library. I wrote a lesson plan for my lesson tomorrow. Not much to report here. Some of the students are almost done, others have barely started. Meh.

17/06/08
Prac Block Day Twenty-Six

This morning started with me doing another Japanese lesson. I continued on last weeks pet lesson by teaching the kids how to count animals and then starting on jobs. I didn’t get through as much as I thought I would with jobs, the vocab took longer than I expected and tended to drag. Also the students are pretty quiet, so I had to work quite hard to keep the energy up. I think last week an aspect of the lesson that helped that was to get the students up and walking around.

The day continued with Maths – no one wanting to work as usual – and then Maths again, a few more people wanting to work here.

The final lesson of the day I actually ended up preparing for my class tomorrow. I’m going to take the students through how to count animals, but I had to modify the lesson a lot for the younger students, otherwise they really won’t get through what I have planned.

1 comment:

Miat said...

Students not doing any work in grades 8 to 10 and expecting to get through grades 11 and 12 is really quite common, you know.

Especially in maths because most kids don't seem to like maths and don't understand it and so they just struggle to get through the term, pass the exam and then forget everything by the start of the next term because they didn't do enough work before because they don't like doing it and thus can't understand it. It's really a neverending cycle if you ask me.

I guess it doesn't help that they also don't see the use in algebra and differentiation and all that and they can't see when or why they would ever actually need to use it in real life. =P

But that's basically why everyone hits grade 11 or 12 and finds a huge jump in difficulty - that is, because the junior years are always teaching new basic things which people don't bother to remember whereas the senior years teach new things based on those basic things which no one's bothered to remember. So instead of having the same amount of new stuff to learn, they have twice as much because they have to relearn the basic stuff as well and no one has time for that!


(Phew, I think I'm procrastinating to have written so much. =P)