Friday 17/10/08 – Prac Block Day Ten

Spares again, and nothing much to prepare. Annoying. Yesterday was a long day of planning and orginising, but I think I did so much that I now have nothing to do. The morning started with Clan – a long and extended clan. Tara ended up taking the kids to the library and using the internet to find out things like how often they need a break at work and what not. Apparently the year ten clans all have things like this to work though, because the students should be developing their SET Plans and thinking about jobs and what not, but it also apparently takes a lot less time than they allocate for it.

After this, I had breaks until 1:00 when I had the grade 8 music tech class for 35 mins. I taught the kids to sing in Japanese, which went down seriously well, but then doing scales – which I knew they could breeze through, they decided they didn’t want to work. They were chatty and distracted. It was terrible. So hard to get them focused. I was racking my brains on how to get them through it, but nothing worked. *sigh * One of my serious weaknesses is this lack of understanding the class, and how to pull them in… but not in a behaviour sense.

Anyway, then I rushed for the bus to get to ice skating, which I made. Hooray! Tara and I had a chat about homework on the bus and how to give it. I think it’s really hard for me to understand needing to baby kids through things, because I never needed it. (ok, so I probably did, but not to this extent). If someone told me “this is your homework” I would have done it. I wouldn’t have needed it to be written down and explained out to me. But these kids do → all of them. It’s hard to try to pull back for these things when they seem so simple.

Ice skating was fun, we had 33 kids, all having a skate – they were pretty good. I just watched, the ice was so slippery we had heaps of kids fall down and I didn’t want to add myself to that tally. They have a good go at it, and then we all pile back on the bus and were back at school by 2:45. Easy, if somewhat boring afternoon.

This morning I had the grade 11’s for music, they were doing practice. I cleaned up all of the keyboards and pluged some in and what not. Out of the 38 keyboards, 13 are not working due to some fault. I didn’t have time to do headphones as well, but honestly, it was good to be doing such things, rather than just sitting around. I hate sitting around.

Which is what I’m doing now. Time to go through the lesson plans for next week and see what I can do.

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Humm… spent a lot of today not doing a lot. Thought about my teaching though, while driving home. I feel like being at Macgregor, I’ve somehow lost it. Like, I knew how to teach, but all of a sudden, I’m not teaching. I feel like I’ve lost the plot for some reason.

I was reflecting (again) on Thursdays music lesson with the grade 8’s, and I think I would have done it completely differently, but I’m so out of my zone at the moment that nothing is connecting. Including my teaching. I think maybe I’ve been trying to do things “the Macgregor way” I’ve forgotten what “the Paula way” is. And that’s bad.

The thing is now, if I walk into the classroom and try to relive the Paula way, the teachers are going to freak out, not to mention the kids. So I’ve pretty much got to struggle on the Macgreor way and try my hardest to do it so well that I pass this prac with flying colours, make it out alive and with job prospects to go to.

Back in the real world, my Jap lesson last went well, though the kids were jumpy and not in the mood to work. Tara doesn’t’ think that I predict the kids well enough for the lesson to flow. Also, my lesson on Tuesday, she’s not giving me feed back on the plan. She just wants me to teach and then decided weather or not I’ve planned it well enough.