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| Some of my year 11 students |
My first day rolled around and I'm not going to lie, I was a bit nervous. However, I had all those wonderful instructions to keep my courage bolstered. My first class was at 7:30 in the morning and the first hitch in my day happened. I could not find the class. I walked around, and still could not find it, so I asked my counterpart to show me to class. When we arrived at the class, my second and third hitch happened consecutively. The students were already in class. I was not late by any means, however, the students stay in one class the entire day and they just switch students. This meant that I could not stand at the door and greet each student as he/she came in with a great big smile. The only way that I could do this was if I sent out the students, then made them come back inside. I considered this for a split second, but i decided against it. I did greet all the students in the class with a big smile. I think I showed too much teeth, because they shrank back a little bit. My third hitch was that my counterpart was the one that introduced me to the class and he introduced me as Joshua. He did not put a Mr. in front of my name, which kind of messed me up. I really wanted to be called Mr. Joshua. After introducing me and spoiling my childhood dream, he left to go teach his class and there I was, in front of 35 year eleven students, just looking at me.
Now, I will admit that I am not the most detail oriented kind of person. I usually just make a general plan and then go with the flow. So far, it has worked pretty well for me. However, for this first class, I went out of my way to plan my lesson. I had a legit lesson plan. Firstly, I went over my expectations for the students. I had corny lines like "I expect all of you to have fun and learn", I then went over what the students could expect from me, I said phrases like "You can expect me to be prepared for every class". I did not come up with this idea of expectations, I read it in a teaching book also. I made the students write down my expectations for them in their notebook. (When I taught the french students, it was fun translating the expectations to french). I then made the students introduce themselves to me and tell me one thing they like to do. The most favorite answers were: the girls said play volleyball and the guys said play football.
I then started teaching the students about the basic computer system. The desktop, monitor, keyboard, mouse and printer and how they all work together. I was going to make the class more of a discussion than a lecture (I think, I was still in my college mode). However, I ran into my fourth hitch. The students were very quiet and shy. In fact, for almost the entire year, I could not hear them when they spoke, they spoke to quietly. I was also going to have the students write their own notes during the course of our discussion. However, again, this did not work out as planned. I quickly fell into the routine of talking at the students and occassionally asking them questions.
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| Me with another teacher |
My period was about an hour long and by the end of the hour, inspite of the hitches, I was feeling pretty good. Although the students generally remained quiet, they seemed interested in the subject matter and I was interested in talking about it, so it was a good mix. We played hangman at the end of class and the students performed well. I asked them questions relating to what we had learnt that day and depending on how well they answered, the guy either got hanged or not. My mom called me that day or the next day and I gushed to her how much I loved teaching. It does feel good to teach somebody and have them know what you taught them. I thought I would feel like that for the entire year. Oh how wrong I was!!!!
