Wednesday 04/06/08
Prac Block Day Eighteen

I’ve come to discover that the life of a teacher is very repetitive. Especially if you only teach one subject at the same level all the time. But I’ve also noticed that the students tend to make every lesson interesting despite this.

Tuesday was a standard Tuesday at school. Japanese in the morning started off with some revision and then a listening and reading test. The students won’t be graded on their tests, but they will give an idea of how they are going with the language. I got to mark the tests, and on average the students got about 70% right. Not too bad.

After this we had maths and maths again. We have started the new unit of maths, so this meant more photo copying and handing out booklets to students. It also means collecting the old work. Some students are very on time about their work, others however, need a lot of encouragement to remember to hand their work in. My teacher is still collecting work from over 5 weeks ago now! Shocking!

I have marked most of the money games work, and the students are on their next unit. These are on topics such as taxes, “the cost of living” (house hold bills etc), home improvements (costing do it yourself jobs around the home) and “wages and salaries”. The units are also smaller than the others have been, so students are able to complete more than one in the 3 weeks that they have to do it.

The students have been working fairly well, we had maths again today and they did work for most of the time. The rain craze is fading (thankfully!) and things are getting back on track.

Sport on Tuesday was cancelled (the ground was still soaking) so I just did marking and photo copying during the spare.

Today, I had music first. The teacher took the students though how to play and write for drums. It was a pretty good lesson – especially considering we didn’t have enough sticks for everyone and drums are one of the hardest things to play. One of the students got really frustrated that he couldn’t get it, so the teacher gave us all a prep talk about why we keep trying. It was a pretty good lesson. I love the small class feel. I’m excited about taking them for piano writing next Wednesday!

Maths and maths again for the next two sessions, before I had Japanese for last lesson. In this Japanese class, the students had to do the same tests as the previous class and then they wrote out a good copy of the family trees and descriptions they had been working on in class.

I was pretty shocked, about four of the boys hadn’t been to class for a while and so the teacher took them through the basic outline of what they had to write (almost hand feeding them the answers!). I can’t say what shocked me more – that they were almost hand fed answers or that they didn’t realise it and did some of the most shocking work I’ve ever seen.

I guess when you take a class for a while you begin to really like them and want them to succeed so much that you will try to feed them answers.

Staff meeting cancelled, so I came home early to write my music lesson plan, my lesson plan for next Tuesdays Japanese class on pets, my over view for the kankyou unit and my overview for Australian Music. Yay planning!