First day of prac

So, my first day of 4 weeks of prac teaching Stage 3 at a local school.

Unreal experience and I can really feel my mum's background and passion for teaching coming through me. After the day was done and I was reflecting with my brother and my son on the day, I got a shiver up my spine and realised that I was really looking forward to waking up tomorrow and seeing the kids again ... I want more, I love it.

Learning: An interesting way a teacher dealt with a difficult class - she asked the kids to sit in alphabetical order and inevitability this led to friends not sitting next to each other. If they were well behaved then they got a choice of sitting next to their friends. It did turn out that three of the friends did end up sitting together (go boys for picking friends by alphabet!). There was a complaint in the class with one student saying it was not fair. The teacher moved one of the boys away. It caused some angst with the boys but the complainers were happy. I wonder what cost this movement had on the original great original idea to set up the seating arrangement in alphabetical order?

Learning: In drama we were doing a play. Love the way students were put into groups based on reading ability and so they could share a common interest at the right level. They really excelled at finding a leader to assign parts of the play and went about going through the play with some little distractions.

Learning: Having two "teachers" (well one and a bit) in the class is very useful - typical me, wanting to get involved straight away and so am helping the kids get through their work - loving it.

My day:
2 hour induction, Art class, comprehension, interrogate Brett (ie. ask me any question they like), do the play.

Student questions of me:

• Why do you want to be a teacher?
• Have you done teaching before (Testing me out obviously!)
• Do you get paid to do this teaching? (No)
• Followup question: so how do you earn money?
• Follow, followup: so how much money do you earn per day in your IBM job?
• (I got them to work out what IBM stands for)
• What does IBM do?
• What is the best thing you are working on?
• How big is the biggest computer?