It’s the last week of teaching practice and I am still enjoying it. Despite only having been at Bosmansdam for two weeks, I have to admit that I am still very much fond of the interaction with learners, especially those who I can see are eager to know more and to do well. My experience with the learners at Bosmansdam thus far has been a testing one. The learners here are much more prone to taking advantage of the student teacher, lessons this week saw a number of learners being late for class as well as generally not paying attention in class. Each offence was dealt with as needed. The learners seemed to only just be getting used to me by the time I had to leave which was very sad for me, not emotionally, but just a general feeling of having left things half done. I would have loved to have spent more time with these learners in order to see the effects of my lessons on the tests which they had done on Thursday.
I warmed up a great deal to this school in my last week here, the different characters in each class, the general interaction with learners in the hallways as well as class. If this has taught me anything though it is that I need to make sure I maintain the boundaries between teacher and friend. Many learners can misinterpret a friendly teacher as being a friend and I think this is something I might have trouble with as I am a very friendly person naturally. My plan is just to have a set of rules that I stick by and enforce them for all learners regardless what they think. This will ensure fairness and a good working environment where all learners are motivated to work and get things done.
Monday I had planned to catch up on some observations for my subject of Maths Lit and the day began as planed and I had thus not planned any lessons for the day. This however changed as my teacher was called to the hall for an emergency. I took over the class and went through some activities with the class, the lesson turned out to be quite a success as we completed quite a bit of work, the reason so much could be done is because the learners sat quietly and did the work. Previously I had attributed the slow working pace of the class to them not being able to understand but that day I realised they were simply too distracted before.
My lessons on Tuesday went very well, my grade 10 class was very responsive in their lesson and the grade 11s seemed to catch on to the work well. My only issue with the grade 11s is how familiar they are becoming with me. Many of them push the boundaries with talking while I talk, or making jokes of “free period” when they ask if I am teaching. I do plan to enforce stricter discipline once I have my own class and I do not have another person’s class to try and take over in such a short time.
Wednesday I did a bit of revision with my classes for a test they were writing on Thursday and they seemed to appreciate it, many of them left the class saying they finally understood, and they felt ready for the test the next day. They were much more interested once it was work that they had to do for a test. I am considering giving my classes the outline of a test long in advance, at least a week so that they can see what they need to focus on for the test. This is just an idea for now and will need a lot more thought and planning but it’s a start of a plan for my teaching next year.
Thursday was meant to be my last day of teaching as I finished off my last few lessons with the classes but the class had to go over their tests one more time in class so they could see all of their mistakes and correct them. This ran over into Friday and from what I have seen, learners do not respond well to this kind of work on a Friday, Fridays require a more fun program to keep learners attention.
My final week at the school was a good one in the end, there were a few hang ups and a few times where I was frustrated by the learners but I still looked forward to class every day and that to me is the best part. I am still very much excited to become a teacher and to have a class of my own soon.
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