Wiped Wednesday

This evening I'm absobloodylutely exhausted - wiped is the precise term to be sure.
This morning I taught two lessons in a row: year eight again, this time in the computer room writing up stories and then year seven straight after - introducing speech, well carrying on really from where Pebbles, my prac supervisor, left off.

Then in the afternoon we had an excursion with year nine to go visit the senior campus. Didn't get a break all day and discovered that standing up in my boots all day makes for very sore feet.

The lessons went okay - the computer room was really noisy, didn't have enough computers for all the students and I felt I was shoving snow uphill trying to get some of the students to do any work. Bribery seems to work better than coercion for a lot of the other teachers and I can see a reward system becoming a big part of my teaching practice over the next few weeks.

As Ray, the classroom management guy earlier this year said, good students don't need rewards, but even though this is the top year eight class, motivation and initiative are in short supply. I think I'm going to set up a raffle ticket system for all my classes starting Monday - give out chocolate bars on Friday to three winners from each class.

My first year seven class went a lot smoother, and I managed to pretty much get all of their names down in the first lesson, which I was pretty happy with. Again, there were a few bumps and hiccups, but on the whole I was pretty happy with their ability to produce some fine work and I think this is going to be my favourite class over the next few weeks - not that I'm picking favourites of course.

I learnt a couple of really important lesson today, possibly the hard way, about not being able to run with Pebbles' classroom management strategies as my own. It's easy to walk into a classroom and expect the students to behave for me as they have done for a different teacher; but of course that teacher has spent a lot of time building up a relationship with that class and I am a different person - a fact the students are well aware of. So of course I have to start from scratch with everything and build up my own strategies from scratch. Need to remember that with year nine tomorrow, as their reputation as not the brightest bunch in the school, precedes them.

The excursion in the afternoon was interesting but tiring. It wasn't especially well organised from the senior campus perspective and there were mix up with who was supposed to be where. Lunch was the typical sausage sizzle, a sausage between two slices of white bread and a slurp of sauce for everyone else, and an apple and a squished banana from the bottom of my bag, for me. There was a session before lunch and a session after; we went to the Trade Fair bit first before being removed (bad organisation) to the boring bit. The trade fair consisted of each year niner being given $30 in token money and a choice of different stalls at which to spend it, each stall's option costing paper$5 (not AUS$5)! There was a lot of sugar and fat (donuts, spiders, lollies, chips etc) on sale, a movie, some games and a few competitions with real cash (gift voucher) prizes. The sugar supplemented my squashed fruit for lunch. The we got whisked away to a classroom where students were being tortured by having to think of responsible vs irresponsible behaviour etc. Pebbles had to go back to this in the afternoon, but let me, the praccy, go back to the trade fair. I was kind of over it the first time, but at least I got to eat more sugar, which is still buzzing around my brain!