Day 8 :: meltdown

I woke up this morning not really wanting to go to school, exhausted before I started and seriously considering chucking a sickie. But today I learnt a lot.

My first class was handwriting. I got in early and wrote out the words on the rolled up piece of whiteboard, some of my spelling was a bit off but Rebecca said that I spent too much time focussing on the content rather than the form of the letters. She also asked rather acidly whether we were taught the Victorian standard for cursive handwriting. Another of her digs at the course. And the answer is no. Plus, I was taught to write very differently, letters were looped below the line and s's looked completely different, as did r's; all letter are now linked by a diagonal line. I also found it odd that kids these days aren't taught how to print but are launched straight into cursive, supposedly removing the transition difficulty later.

In poetry writing I got caught up with random questions, spent too long at the front of the class talking and was starting to getting really really exhaustion frazzled. We ended up not getting enough time to finish writing let alone for the students to share what they had written. Apparently one of the focuses of primary education is going from whole group to small group or individual work and then back to whole group. This way the kids get to share what they were doing, develop a sense of its importance and themselves as individuals within a larger group.

In maths, total meltdown occurred when the front table of boys just wouldn't stop talking, focus and do their work. A lot of this was because of the expectations I did or didn't put on them, but hoped the mere idea of punishment would convince them to behave. Clearly this was never going to work. I nedd to be much clearer about boundaries.

This also happened to be the lesson Thomas, my prac coordinator came in to watch and he ended up yelling at the boys and putting them in their place. When I talked to him about the lesson during lunch (at which time the build up of stress overflowed into tears) he spent a lot of time talking about processes: how I need to plan my whole-group-whole transitions as carefully as my content; how to get kids set up and organised and moving from one project to another with minimal fuss so as not to lose tie and focus in these in between periods. He said if you watch how primary teachers operate they have every step included for a reason. I learnt more from Thomas in half an hour than I had from Rebecca in a week and a half.

After lunch I had integrated studies and I took all this advice on board and feel like the lesson went much better. We were discussing the effect white settlers has on the indigenous community when they arrived. I took them from a whole group discussion to a small group brainstorm and then back to a whole group report back with much less drama. The students worked much much better. Rebecca said I broke from whole to small at exactly the right time. It was some rare and exceedingly welcome praise.