Reflection for Week 6

To everyone reading this, I have come to realise that schooling is muuuuch more time consuming than I anticipated. It is most likely because I have not yet hit my stride and perfected my form. I am slow to learn names, and although I'm getting there with some of the learners, I have too many classes to get all their names. Fortunately some of the teachers have calmed my nerves in that they also do not know all of the learners names. For me it would be a process that takes time.

The Grade 11's wrote my official Math Lit test for their term. I have to admit, it is a skill to set the papers. It is almost as if it is a world that I was completely unaware of. ML is completely different from either accounting or Math.
I'm now busy learning how to mark question papers. The teacher, in her wisdom, copied some papers for me to mock mark. It was a blessing in disguise as it is really a hassle to mark ML papers. I am without words for the interpretation some of the learners had for the questions. From the tests I had mock marked, only one was reasonable. It makes you want to get the learners on a one to one basis and just ask them how they were able to get to the methods or answers they had gotten to. I originally thought that the paper was too easy but after this initial marking, I'm concerned about the future of our country. If it was my class, I would write a letter to all their parents and request that they all attend the Math Extra classes that we're doing on a Thursday after school. Funny thing is that none of these learners have been to one single class this whole term, and they seriously need it.

I only have two weeks within which to mark these papers and am slightly concerned that it might not be enough time, especially considering that I need to still finish setting the Grade 10 paper for ML and get my Accounting assessments done and marked as well. Keeping in mind that my number of lessons (and prep) are not decreasing AND that my krit lesson for accounting is closing in, Its going to be a stressful last month.

This week I tried to take the advice of the ML teacher and bring a bit more of myself into the classroom. Instead of doing the standard exercises that was planned for the learners, I made my own exercises for them to do towards the end of the week. I had put a lot of effort into the lessons and questions and was flabbergasted at how things went sideways from what I had planned and anticipated.

The mistakes I had made in this one lesson were as follows:

1. In order to get the learners to pay attention, decided to not give them a printout of the exercise questions, but rather to have them take it down into their books. This was my first mistake as there were some learners that just did not bother to do anything. I was upset about their lack of respect for the effort that I had put into the lesson, but there were at least some learners who did pay attention and were seriously interested, which makes you appreciate teaching them even more.
I should have printed the diagram and questions so that the learners could read and understand as I went through what was expected. According to the teacher, the fact that they did not have this piece of paper, caused some of the learners to decide that the exercise was too difficult and they just switched off.

2. My next mistake was to rephrase the questions. The learners kept asking me to repeat the question. I interpreted this that they did not understand what I had asked and therefore I rephrased the questions. Towards the end, a learner suggested that I rather write down the questions and then they got to it.

3. The third mistake was to not have a printed copy with the dimensions written down. To avoid confusing the learners, I made a shape with and without dimensions. The program I used could only export to PDF. The PDF reflecting the dimensions, was too small to read from my tablet and I could not enlarge the picture. On my laptop it was all good, but in the class I could not read it and I had to decipher and try to remember what the values were. Needless to say, I did get some of them wrong, which messed up the calculations and thus caused me to have to amend the questions on the go.

4. The teacher also commented that my 3's and 5's look very similar when I'm writing on the board. This is the first time that I'm hearing this, so its going to take a conscious effort for me to change this going forward.

The end result is that I will be required to spend another lesson now and redo that lessons so that the learners can understand how to do it. I have however now addressed the previous mistakes and hopefully Monday's lesson would be significantly better.

It appears to me that the later we get into the game, the more I'm learning. Maybe it is because the original hype is over the the learners are now settling and starting to push their boundaries.

Until the next post, happy teaching.