Running on empty....

All you taxpayers, rest assured that your money is well spent on trainee teachers, we are really worked to the max in our teacher training....

Thursday again, an extremely long day where classes run for 9 hours straight. Ed psy class is killing me, especially when I have totally zilch interest in all the theories that I am forced to digest and regurgitate. Geog class is always something that I look forward to, but alas, not my usual self today as I had no energy, coming from the fact that I had a lousy lousy sleep.

Enough rambling, let's dive on into what happened during Geog class today:

1. Be prepared to handle issues related to students' death. When Kenneth talked about this, it quickly brought back sad memories of my time at ACS when one of my fellow school-mates from the same batch of mine, fell into a coma after suffering from some infection. He subsequently died. What made it all the more scary for us was the fact that he was in the school's swim team, meaning he was fit as a fiddle, and the thought of him dying scared the bajeezers out of us as if a fit person could suddenly die, what about the rest of us? Furthermore, he was a dear friend to many of us, even if we did not know him personally, we will definitely know at least one person who knows him.... Fortunately for us, some of the teachers did talk about it and addressed the issue. The various prayer sessions for my school-mate also somewhat comforted us. This brings on the importance of the need for teachers to be ready if such an unfortunate incident was to happen. How should teachers react? For how long a time do we allow students to mourn? How much discussion and counselling should be done? What will be the right things to say, the comfort words that students want to hear? Being sensitive, tactful and constantly aware of the situation will aid teachers to do the right thing and say the right words. But the real litmus test will be when such a scenario happens to yourself when you are teaching....I hope I do not have to encounter this...or at least, as minimal as possible.

2. Resources from Edumall. View these resources through critical lenses and assess them by how relevant they are in your lesson. Do not take them for granted and assume that they are 100% useful or 100% relevant for your needs. Never thought of that. Actually, I did assume that since they are from MOE, they probably would have gone through some stringent approval process before it was uploaded to the site. At least my eyes are opened now.

3. Checking for students' understanding of the lesson. Have back-up questions to gauge the students' understanding of your lesson. Hmmm...yeah, I fully agree with that, but I find that I probably will need to work on this aspect as when the lesson is ongoing, things might be unpredictable and situations might crop up that throws one off guard, meaning that whatever back-up questions that you might have might go *poof* in an instant. I guess this comes with practice and experience.

4. The use of questionable analogies by students. Questionable here, implies the use of disgusting or horrid or out of this world analogies which students might say or use in the context of a lesson. For example last week, somebody was using the analogy of flatulence and defecation when the topic of vulcanicity was being discussed. Although the analogy was somewhat disgusting, it did make some sense (don't ask me how and why). So when teachers come across such analogies, we should not reject the student's answer immediately (as at least it goes to show that the students are thinking). What the teacher could do would be to bounce the analogy off other students' viewpoints and see how they react to it. Additionally, the teacher can actually make full use of the analogy but asap try to re-focus the class to the actual lesson and with the use of appropriate analogies. That way, the students will not feel that their ideas are not immediately rejected outright. If they perceive their ideas to be rejected and not appreciated, they might actually stop contributing all together.

5. Don’t feel that you are bound to pursue every disciplinary action that crops up. This is an important point. You, being the teacher, are the professional. Thus the onus is on you to choose the appropriate action when dealing with acts of transgression. If you are ‘ignoring’ the action, at least let the offender know that you are not ignoring it. Alternatively, you can let the entire class know that you are not ignoring it. Or if the transgression is more severe, approach the action more thoroughly and follow up with the appropriate measure of desist teachniques.

L's Micro-teaching session:

The context of L's micro-teaching session was that of a class of Sec 1 Normal Academic students. The topic of the lesson was on Earthquakes.

On hindsight, nothing "colourful" and "interesting" really happened today during both micro-teaching sessions so I shall just comment on the more visible issues.

I believe that L was the first to actually make us stand up and exercise since we were rather restless during class. L's use of playing on students' conscience to desist their disruptive behaviour did work somewhat. I felt that it was generally effective in controlling disruptive students when you mention to them that they being noisy will affect their fellow classmates who genuinely want to study.

When viewing the video, I noticed that L was always observing our behaviour from the corner of her eye and was able to intercept the note that was being passed around. This overlapping technique of keeping one eye on the screen while the other eye on us is good as a teacher must be constantly aware of what is going on in class.

L's voice was also very clear and well-projected. Her tone when dealing with disciplinary problems was very firm and she made sure that she did not go down to the student's level when she was dealing with the issue of SJ complaining that she was being maligned by Wes and well, everybody else in class hah hah. Additionally, she showed concern for her students when she went up to M and R to ask them howwhat was wrong when they both looked as if they were not feeling well.

All in all, I find that although L settles transgressions fast, she doesn't seem to be able to pinpoint the source of the problem and nip it in the bud, but this of course, can be learned.

WH's Micro-teaching session:

The context of WH's micro-teaching was that of a Sec 3 Express class. The topic of the lesson was on folds.

Personally, I fel that WH’s communication and instructions to us were not very clear. I'm not sure whether if there's something wrong with my hearing but I thought that her tone was shaky, which in my opinion, meant a lack of confidence? Students might take advantage of such a situation.... Additionally, I felt that her use of sarcasm when dealing with students’ transgression might cause a rift between herself and her students. I can't remember specific examples when she did that but it was done quite often. I do remember how SuperLambanana and myself reacted rather negatively to her sarcasms even when they were not directed to either of us.

But there was a point when I felt that WH was rather scary, I believe that was when she just about had it with us being disruptive and she gave those scary eyes. Don't think I'll forget those eyes for a while...heh.

Lastly, granted that her topic on folds might be difficult, I felt that she had difficulty bridging her expert knowledge to the students' novice knowledge. A good example was when M, R and myself were rather confused while looking at the photograph (nice photographs by the way) as we just couldn't see how we could draw the folds accurately and were wondering where the axis was. WH really had difficulty explaining to us what we really needed to know.

However, I believe that all these issues will be sorted out over time.