Thank God it's Friday

I am so so so tired. But in a good way.

Today I followed my year eight class all around school and watched them under different teachers. It was really educational. In geography they were really chatty, not at all engaged with the work and didn't really do very much. In maths they were a little bit better, even though they said the maths teacher was their favourite teacher, but there was still lots of talking going on whilst he was trying to explain pi to them. In science after recess they were much much better behaved. No talking for the beginning part of the lesson and everyone on task. Unfortunately the teacher gave them too long for the task and the silliness picked up in a big way, but then they got to watch a video on collisions whilst she explained all the students' idiosyncrasies. Next was P.E. theory and i was absolutely amazed. The subtle whiff of fear in the classroom kept everyone quiet as a mouse. This, on e of the chattiest groups in the school and you could have heard a pin drop. The downside was that all they got to do for the 45mins was copy notes of the smartboard and the room was filled with the scratching of pens busily at work. Even when they teacher left the room for a couple of minutes, apart from a couple of nervous giggles, silence was maintained.

I taught them in fifth period, and after a day of telling them I wasn’t in class to discipline or teach them, the whip came out. I think they made the mistake of thinking that because I had spent the day building relationships with them as a class and individually, I now wanted to be their best friend and they could get away with anything. Ha! It didn’t help that it was last period Friday (true last period is reserved for teachers’ meetings and detention) and we were all itching to get out of the room.

We were reading stories they had been writing for the past couple of lessons and my timing was out because I spent so much time trying to discipline them at the beginning of the lesson. After each student read out their story I tried to elicit some form of analysis from the class - Pebbles said it would have worked better if I had given them a matrix to base their judgements on, which his a good lesson for next time. Then I almost ran ot of time and was caught with a task that I didn’t really have time for, so it was a bit messy. I could have used the games on the smartboard but didn’t really want to reward them for mucking around so much. An interesting lesson and a lot learnt.