The Second Block of Prac

Haven’t updated the blog for the longest time. Teaching two classes is definitely stressful and busy. Lesson planning, making demos, creating assessments, etc took up a lot of time and thus led to the lack of posting. Sorry about that! 

I finished second block of my practicum but I still have an assignment to mark. Overall it was a success. During this block, I was teaching 11U and 12C Physics. I was already teaching the 11U before this block, so I knew the students fairly well. 12C on the other hand was a different story. At first I was a bit nervous because I have never taught a college class before, nor have I ever taken one. It seemed like it was going to be a challenge. However, it turned out that it was much easier teaching the college than the university students. The pace of the class is much slower, and I was very lucky that my students were very well behaved. It was also an all boys class, so there were no females there to distract them. 

Style of teaching and evaluations for the college kids were completely different. I tend not to assign homework for them, since none of them ever do it. I also have to collect everything they do in class, in case they lose it the next day. They get evaluated through in class assignments, quizzes and tests. There are some strong students in the college class and occasionally, I do put up homework for those who are interested. There is also less emphasis on calculations and more on the physics and hands-on. For example, instead of covering the electro-mag unit over a 2 week period, we only covered electricity for the college kids, while the university level we covered electricity and magnetism. A lot of the times, the college kids would be playing with computer simulations and building their own circuitry with capacitors, resistors, etc. They would have to solder the circuits. They tend to enjoy that a lot and actually come to class. If the college kids think your class is boring, they wouldn’t show up. Therefore, you must make it fun so they think it is worth coming. (Very different situation with the university kids). I guess you can say they are driven differently.

Some of the demos/labs/activities that I did for this prac were:

Homopolor motor

Simple Dc motor

Speakers

‘Generator’

Human circuit representation

Energy Ball

Lighting a light bulb

Anyway, that is just a brief entry about my 3^rd block.

Have a good holiday!