Monday 9 May 2016

Second Year Teaching Placement: Day Six

I am not a fan of Mondays…. It’s just hard recovering from the weekend and all the beauty of chill days, only to be faced with the dreadful work on Mondays. Today was a bad start, I arrived on time to school which meant I was late in teacher time. Amélie was sort of mad at me because I could tell that she wanted to go through her lesson plans for the day with me before school started but couldn’t because I wasn’t even there. I could tell that she wasn’t feeling 100% this morning, so I felt super bad that my tardiness was just another thing to add to her down mood. Then when I asked to use the washroom I could tell that was the cherry on top of annoyance but when we were doing the mindfulness walking I apologized profusely. I’m just a chronically late person and honestly it’s terrible, and I need to make a conscious effort to change my bad habits. Anyway, she taught a grade 9 class and asked if I wanted to teach the Bingo portion so I said yes of course. It started off as super slow but then I kind of made the children get up and walk around and that facilitated a bit of discussion which was nice. Seeing them interact with each other was nice since it allowed them to communicate with each other in French. After that was a grade 10 class which was generally the same. I walked around and helped the students and one of the students asked me a bunch of questions like “how long did I do French for?” What would I be teaching if it weren’t for English and French?” Which was all super nice because I like that kind of interaction, and I told her to keep French just for fun because she was already getting good at speaking it and it’s always so helpful to speak another language.

Next was lunch and I just stayed in the office. Diane (Amélie’s office partner) asked if I wanted to go on a field trip with her on Wednesday! I was so happy because it’s a field trip! It’s for a Spanish class and it’s okay because I don’t need to speak in Spanish. It was just her and 35 students and since Amélie was going to be absent anyway, it all worked out in the end. We’re going to an exhibition at the ROM and then we’re going to Kensington Market which will be so fun!

After lunch I stayed in the office and marked a bunch of writing assignments which honestly took so long. I did not expect marking papers to take an hour but that’s just my first time marking that kind of writing stuff so it’s okay. After that I joined Diane’s class for observation and her way of handling a class is so much different than Amélie’s. First she started by introducing me and making a bunch of students ask me some questions like “quel est ton couleur préféré?” “qu’est-ce que tu étudies à l’école?” and stuff like that which was fun for me. Then she made a lot of activities like stations to write and conjugate –ir verbs. So basically she wrote the verb on each paper and the first group had to conjugate it then after rotation the other groups had to write examples using the verb. She played music at each station and when it stopped that meant that the groups had to switch. It was all very interesting, I think I’m going to incorporate that in my teaching for sure.
                                                                                                                                    

It was not a bad day overall, although the start was rough the end was definitely better.



Until next time!
Suzy

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