First Week of Practicum

Here comes the long weekend and a close to the first week of practicum. The host school where I am at is a fairly new school (~ 10 years old). As of now I am really enjoying my time there. I observed for 2 days and started to teach on the Wednesday. I taught and will be teaching grade 11 Physics. On the first day, I just finished off the Kinematics unit on the ‘simple’ projectile motion (with just the horizontal launch). I thought the lesson went ‘okay’. I’ve had previous practicum experience before, so voice projection and comfort ability in front of a class was not a huge issue. However, it was quite intimidating because there were 30 students in the class! On the first day I did a POE (followed the way you did it Tom, and it went well!) and I think the students were enjoying it. It was a spring launcher of ball bearing versus just a ball bearing falling towards the ground. I also did a PowerPoint with a lot of animation to try my best to help the kids understand the projectile motion. At the end of class my associate and I were reflecting on how I did in that lesson. He gave me a lot of details which I need to work on. This was great because he told me things that I would never have noticed! The day after was a review period.

To be honest, I think it was a disaster, however, my associate told me otherwise (I think my associate was trying to make me feel better). I started off asking if they needed me to review anything before I take up some of the homework questions from previous classes. I spent too much time reviewing and taking up homework and a lot of students who didn’t care about the course (or what I was doing) were getting restless and started to disrupt the class. Next thing I know I was spending too much time trying to do classroom management and made mistakes on the board. It was just a mess. After that class a lot of students seemed concerned about the test that they needed to do for tomorrow! At this point, I felt really bad and felt that I have just ruined their ability to do their test. After class, my associate and I reflected on what happened… He started off by saying that it wasn’t really my fault that the class turned out that way. He said that students’ attention span had changed greatly since I was in High school (differs by school too – I didn’t really have this issue from my last practicum). In some schools students can sit there for 75 minutes and copy whatever the teacher is writing on the board. However, after 10-20 minutes of lack of stimulation, majority of students in my current school become restless. My host teacher suggested me to take up a few important questions quickly as a class and have students work independently. During this time, I can help students who have questions. I think the proposed way will work, however, on the next review period, I might want to try it in a game format. This way, all the students will get involved and hopefully learn something! 

After the long weekend, I’ll start relative motion… We will see how that will go! Hopefully the students did not lose any respect or trust in me after that terrible ‘lesson’. All in all, I felt like I learned a lot and will continue to grow from my experience.

Ps. The 8:05am system is not the best system… it is way too early for students and even teachers. In addition, all the teachers and teacher candidates have different lunches so it is sometimes hard to talk and reflect.