Last Week

The last week at school was kind of a blurr.
With most of the curriculum work completed and tests marked there was not much left to teach to the learners. As a result, I took the initiative and spoke to the teachers about doing some Kahoot games as part of reviewing the terms work covered.
The teachers were also happy with the idea of doing kahoot reviews as it freed up time for them to do some more marking of tests and projects as the deadline for submitting final marks was Thursday.

An unexpected benefit was that I could spend more time with other teachers to discuss my general schooling experience. It also afforded me the time to ensure that all my paperwork with regards to the school practical visit was up to date.

Thursday was a sad day as it was my last day. I spent some additional time saying goodbye to the learners and was made to promise that I will bring the second grade 10 Math Lit class some fudge next week, as they missed out on the fudge I made the one class previously.

The very last thing that a learner told me after school was that my lessons helped her to make sense of accounting. According to her she never previously was able to do accounting and my way of teaching helped her to get good marks for the first time in her high school career.
Her remark alone is proof enough to me that I made the correct choice to become a teacher as I felt over the moon about having made an actual difference in someone's life and knowing that it is something that will benefit the learner for the rest of her life.
A lot of other classes had a lot of comments regarding ways and means with which I can improve my teaching, but after some discussions there was not really any consensus regarding what I can do except that I need to practice my white board writing skills, Funny enough, the girls commented that my black board writing is great but my white board writing needs some attention as I need to re-write a lot of the times, especially if I get excited or write faster.

Week 9 - Lots to talk about

My grade 10 ML class wrote their second formal test for the term and I had set the test for the grade. It was much easier setting it the second time round, although it took 5 revisions to get to the final paper. I am proud of the paper as the teachers said it was a good paper.
We reviewed the test content the two days prior to the test and still there are learners getting below 50%. I felt like murdering them as they were not paying attention and thus lost out on a lot of marks in the test. Speaking to the teachers showed that it is the norm. There are some learners who do well and others who just does nothing. Their opinion seems to be that you can only do so much and that the rest is up to the learner.
There was one learner who skipped classes and when she was finally at school again and confronted, she said she was unaware that a test was written on that day. I was flabbergasted. Besides myself having personally reminded them about the test for the two weeks preceding it, I could not believe that she found nothing wrong with skipping school.

In covering Vat with the classes, I eventually got to a point where I asked the teachers help. My error was to not go to the most basic. I explained terminology, which they knew, why it was importent in their lives, etc.
When I got to the calculations, I realised that they understand and use direct proportion. I used an Ice Cream with Astro's example to visualise the calculations, which they got.
However, I kept the vat equation on top of the board and used the space below for calculations and that confused the daylights out of them. It turned out that I just had to write the actual calculation separately as the formula on the top confused them.
I never would have imagined that something so basic could confuse them so much.

On a positive note, I'm a lot better at marking answer papers and it is an extremely helpful tool to understand how the learners think. My conclusion is that I should have regular assessments.

I experimented today (Friday) with getting the grade 9 EMS classes to do an exercise while kahoot is waiting for them. When they realised that they can play a game after doing their work, they all worked. This also afforded me the opportunity to walk around and look at them doing the complete exercise as there was no procrastinating, once I checked 2 learner's work who were done. What I also noticed was that before I started kahoot, I reviewed the most common mistakes made and there were a lot of oooohs and aaaahs, as they remembered why they had made mistakes. It is evident that exam technique is something that the majority of learners lack. They get caught up in details and do not read thd question. The result is that they then lose marks unnecessarily. The teachers do however cover it in LO. I have decided that I will need to cover this in my classes when I'm teaching.

In the kahoot games, they said they did not know the answers, yet most of them got the answers correct 99% of the time. It seems they just lack a bit of confidence.

Week 8

What a week. It started off with a grade 8 excursion at the botanical garden, which ended up with the clouds breaking on the way back to school. I had not been this wet in years. Fortunately the school gave me time off, to go home and change, eventhouh the drive took 2hours. All the grade 8's got the day off, but I had to teach official classes towards the end of the day.
The lesson I learned was that I will definitely need to always have a spare set of clothes in my classroom for emergency situations.
I started setting the new Grade 10 official assessment for Math Lit and am exited to see how it would go. Setting up official tests takes a lot of time to do. My test was supposed to consist of only 50 marks, but I ended with 72 marks, so that the subject head can moderate and take out questions that they feel is not required.

I also got invited for an interview and am exited about the opportunity. I realised this week that my internal clock is set for school and i wake up before my alarm and cannot wait to get to school. I defintely made the right choice to study teaching as it is extremely exhausting, yet provides a feeling of accomplishment at the end of the day.

I also started to finnish my file and realised there is still quite a bit that I need to get done. Unfortunately I was ill and would therefore not have a holiday this term. At least I'll be able to catch up on some admin during my last week as the school work winds down. My grade 9 EMS classes are already at a point where they no longer have work to cover, so I'm going to start doing Kahoot review games of work done the term.
My Accounting assessment is also on Monday, so I have a big week ahead.

Week7

I can seriously recommend that you do a formal assessment as part of training.
I had set the test for Math Lit and then proceeded to mark the grade 11 test, which has given me signifficant insight into the learners understanding of the subject.
What I found interesting is the correlation between learners paying attention and their marks. The weeks leading up to the test, I told them the work was important. Those that listened, did well, those that did not ...
My biggest issue in the marking was to be consistent. Even though it is math lit, there is still a lot of interpretation, marking with mistakes, etc. It takes muuuuch longer than what the accounting papers did.
Secondly, the learners do not read the questions or just leave out certain questions.
In my feedback, they claimed the paper was very different from their work done in class, but when we went through the paper, they then agreed that it was the same as what we did in class. They jusgneed to learn proper exam technique in my opinion.

Other than the test, there was nothing new or exciting that happened.