Passing Curiosity: Posts tagged planning https://passingcuriosity.com/tags/planning/planning.xml Thomas Sutton me@thomas-sutton.id.au 2006-10-30T00:00:00Z A well-rounded practical experience https://passingcuriosity.com/2006/a-well-rounded-practical-experience/ 2006-10-30T00:00:00Z 2006-10-30T00:00:00Z I’ve just put in my preferences for my Professional Experience 3 placement next semester. In the interest of a well-rounded set of practical experiences, I’ve requested a placement in either of the senior secondary colleges in Launceston — Launceston College and Newstead College. I did put both down as my first and second preferences for prac. this semester, but didn’t reckon with exams, or whatever else made them decline prac. students (or, maybe, just me). Once I have some senior secondary experience, I’m planning on doing my internship at one of the private schools, hopefully Scotch Oakburn College or the Launceston Church Grammar School.

If everything goes to plan, I’ll have had six weeks in public secondary schools (7-10), four weeks in a public senior secondary school (11-12), and about seven weeks in a private secondary school. I’ll have covered the full secondary age range (12 y.o. to 17 y.o.) from a range of socio-economic backgrounds in both the public and private systems.

]]> The First Day of Classes https://passingcuriosity.com/2006/the-first-day-of-classes/ 2006-09-26T00:00:00Z 2006-09-26T00:00:00Z Today was the second day of PE2 and the first day of classes for term three. We’ve sorted out my time-table, office, computer and photocopier accounts, and keys and I have a list of things to plan and teach during the next four weeks.

I started the day with a double lesson Computer Graphics class. The students are going to spend this week finishing off an TurboCAD assignment from last term and starting next week I’ll take them through my Designing with SketchUp unit. Part of the feedback I got from the lecturer is that the unit could do with some design theory, so I’m going to look at cutting down the work (one project instead of two) and adding in some discussion of design movements and the like. Hopefully it’ll wind up being about three weeks.

After recess, I was with my primary colleague teacher in two maths classes. It was reasonably similar to my experiences during PE1 and left me even more convinced that my experience of mathematics as a high-school student was unusual.

After lunch I had a free block and began thinking about the lessons and units I’ll be teaching in the coming weeks. Tomorrow I’ll be taking one lesson of a grade ten science class looking at forces. I’m planning to get the students to use force meters to measure weight and then calculate the weight of various objects under various strengths of gravity.

Next week I’ll be starting my unit on SketchUp as described above and a unit on computer hardware for a class of students in grades nine and ten. I expect them both to go fairly smoothly. In two and a half weeks the time table changes, due to interference caused by the student production, and I’ll have a class of students in grades seven and eight for IT for the last week. As these students will have such a wide range of ability (while some can program, others haven’t used computers much at all) I’ll be covering Internet safety and basic computer skills with them.

After school ended I spoke with a teacher who had a few questions about getting audio materials from the Internet (streaming audio, podcasts, that sort of thing). In the course of the discussion, I mentioned the resources I have from the outreach programme at NICTA last year, so I might present those short lessons to a maths extended class.

That’s about everything that’s happened so far. I’m off to plan tomorrow’s science lesson.

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