Lets start again

So this week I began at my second school, Bosmansdam High School. It started off a bit confusing but after the first day everything fell into place well. There are a couple of big differences from my previous school, The Settlers High School, mainly the facilities many classes do not have projectors etc., and the majority of staff is Afrikaans which is no problem for me it simply took some time to adjust to. The learners in the classes which I have experienced are much less talkative then what I have experienced before, this I guess I can attribute to the teaching styles of the teachers who take the classes which I am teaching at this point. I am one of two student teachers at the school at the moment and I have yet to connect with any of the teachers enough to sit down to a conversation with them at break time, at this point I saw my time here dragging out. This however was a good lesson to me that once I enter a school in the future, I should be quick about being friendly and building relationships with the other staff lest I be the kind of person who spends breaks on his own due to lack of company. On the Tuesday I began my first teaching interaction with the learners, this was a sort of test to get to know them and allow them to get to know me. The lessons were also somewhat impromptu as my mentor teacher was busy for the first 15 minutes of the period and I took the initiative to get started with the class while he was away. The lessons went well and I have already made some good notes on which learners would be potential trouble makers and will require more personal attention in order to prevent disruptions.
Wednesday’s class to me by surprise despite my planning for it, in all my fussing over finding this school I needed to do my last subject at, I failed to properly take note of the fact that the learners were Afrikaans as well. My lessons on Wednesday were in English and after explaining a particular section I was met with a hand at the back and when I called upon the boy whose hand was up he responded with, “kan maneer miskien in Afrikaans ook verduidelik”, I felt bad for having unintentionally disadvantaged the Afrikaans learners and I had promised to speak both Afrikaans and English in class. I learned that day to pay more attention to my surroundings as after some recalling of the lesson on the Thursday after, I remember some of the learners speaking Afrikaans in the hall ways before class.
Thursday was a bit of a hectic day, I struggled in the class while attempting to teach the grade 11 class and I say attempt because I know what I did was not teaching. The section was on design and planning and I underestimated the difficulty of the work. Rather than plan the lesson for the day I began planning my lesson which I was to be evaluated on by the university on Friday. The minimal planning led to some confusion on my part, with regards to the activity. I managed to figure it out but I had already lost the class and many of them began talking etc. This was the first and will be the last time I make the mistake of underpreparing for a lesson.
On Friday morning I was asked to keep an eye on the concession class, the overflow learners during a test period. I was somewhat thrown in on the deep end as this class had multiple grades and different starting times for their papers. But all went well, there were no incidences, no learners attempted to talk or cheat and I think over all it was a good experience to develop some invigilation skills. Shortly after this I met my evaluator for my Maths Lit lesson, which went as well as I could have hoped considering I had only been with these students for four days and only taught them twice before.  At the end of the day my first week with these learners was great, I have already made some good connections with many of them and I foresee my next week going very well.