A Telescopic View of it All

Which is basically how I feel about my practicuum right now.

Ok, a little background info. This is the first week in my pract. school, which is a rather good school in my area. I've of course met my mentors and I've decided to give the impression of a total idiot. Well, not totally, but I've just been bombarding them with a million and one questions about the school and how things are run here and how the class is run, and I'll probably continue till they think I'm some crazed spaz.

Well, it's the only way I know to get the info I wanna know anyway. :p

but the one thing that really bothered me was my total lack of experience in handling a class.

I knew my mentor's class tended to be on the rowdy side, especially for the boys, but what I didn't realise was how bad I would be at managing them.

For one, the entire class decided to switch places and sit with their best friends! And I didn't remember their names or faces, let alone their seating arrangements, even though I knew some of them switched. Which is also why one of the first things I requested from my CT was a seating arrangement........ which I'm gonna bring into class every lesson from now on........

Then the usual ruckus. Half the class talking while I was talking. Some walking here and there. No one caring or paying attention.

*GIANT SIGH* thankfully this was just a relief, and not an observation. Bye bye, passing grade even.........

Though when I look back, I can see a few things wrong with what I did. I should've really properly introduced myself and most imptly, MY RULES. I donno why, but I had this nice little speech in mind to scare off the little terrors, and then, when it came to an actual classroom situation, I forgot it all!

Thank god I never went into acting................

I don't even know WHY is it I forgot, it just totally slipped out of my mind when I walked in, and I went straight into the lesson. *Sigh* Thank god my CT wasn't around to witness the debacle.

I only have a few things to prop me up on this. First, I'm making sure that next week, when I take over, I dedicate TIME to drill my rules into them, and let them know that I'm not gonna let u step all over me. [even though u may try, and some of u may be damn successful] Then I gotta scream at them a thousand times till they get it in their heads that I do NOT want those rules flouted.

And hopefully I get them into shape for my observation. *twists fingers*

Then I gotta remember the story of my friend too. I had a friend who actually joined the same time I did, but decided one week into the school experience that he could NOT do this.

One thing was that he had a rowdy class like this, which also made it hard for him to control the class. Finally, he decided that he could not do this for life, and sent in his resignation. MOE told him that he had to give 1 mth's notice, so he spent an extra month in that school contract teaching while I went to NIE.

Funny thing though. He said that the longer he spent in the school and in the class, the more he got the hang of classroom mgt. Even though ironically, he learnt the reins just in time for his contract to expire and now he's in the private sector.

So if he could do it after a while, why not I?

A guy was talking to the teachers during contact time just today. He said that sometimes we had to take a telescopic view of things, and look ahead. If we looked microscopically, then all we would ever see would be the short term failures that we did.

But if we looked far, and treated these as experiences...... maybe we might just see a better ending for ourselves.

Let's hope that applies to my teaching career as well.