Friday 30/05/08
Prac Block Day Fifteen

We cooked today for the final time this term. As it was the most senior Japanese group we were making tea as well, so I took my tea ceremony stuff to show them. The group were super efficient – they made yakiniku and stir-fry in twenty five minuets! This meant that we got to spent a lot of the lesson doing teaching and tea stuff. Pretty fun!

Afterwards I went to music where we learnt how to write riffs. I think riff writing could be the hardest thing ever. The students did pretty well though, especially as they got to sit around and play on instruments making their riffs – and it will be useful for their compositions. Again, the positives of having a small class shone through – I couldn’t imagine 20 students sitting around a class room working as effectively (or a school having enough resources to facilitate that anyway).

Something I noticed today was that one of the boys, (from Boat F) who isn’t so intellectually talented, gets to spend some of his time on Fridays with the groundsman. It’s really interesting to see the school facilitate and encourage hands on learning. The boy spent all morning with the groundsman doing a stock take of the schools desks and chairs and writing up the findings.

After morning tea we had maths with Boat D2. Most of the students worked fairly well, although there were a group of boys who were not at all productive. I separated one pair who continued to work together after I told them it was an individual task only to have both boys sit and do nothing for the rest of the lesson (one sulking the other talking to the other people around him).

Maths with Boat F was not too bad today. They were very noisy, but a lot of the students had finished their work and did other things. One of the boys who usually doesn’t excel at maths handed me his finished final task at the very beginning of the lesson! Hooray! I think it’s small victories like these that really make it seem worthwhile to be teaching.