19/06/08
Prac Block Day Twenty-eight

My last day in C2!! HOORAY!! I can’t believe that I am so excited that I’m done with that class, except that today almost every single student in the class asked me at least once (most of them asked twice or more) some kind of question about Russian. Can I speak Russian? Was I born in Russia? What is the time in Russia right now? So glad that at the end of the day I could say dosvidoniya – no more C2!

Ok, so yesterday was a fairly good day. Was able to pull everything together in my last class for the beginners, we did counting but I had to modify the lesson. It went pretty well, my supervising teacher says that my classroom management is improving because I had the students do a task and after the allocated time I said “if you haven’t finished by now, you’ve just been wasting time.” Pretty funny that that’s how my classroom management has improved, but ok.

Today was a very observing kind of day. One of the students had the Third Day the Frost by John Marsden, and considering I’d just read books one, two and four of that series – I was pretty happy to pick up book three. I read it during the last ten mins of class and lunch. Then I got to guillotine paper for the origami cranes we are making tomorrow night. I think I was even over being a teachers aid. A lot of the students in C2 seemed to have a fair few issues that were really playing up today and I didn't want to deal with them.

I wonder if as a teacher I’ll ever get so sick of my class I’ll want to stop teaching them? I guess when you are a full time teacher and you have a whole class from the word go, you have a lot better relationship with them, and you’ve got more of a desire to teach them. That’s probably why many people say that prac is totally different from real teaching. I’d probably agree. Being on prac has been like being a free teachers aid for the last six weeks.