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.
]]>As a stop gap, I drew some simple figures on the board (just a few basic roof, door and window shapes) for the ones who finished earlier than I was expecting to complete and asked the students that finished even those to model items from around the class room. The main thing that I got out of this lesson is the need to have extension work planned and ready to go — making up extension problems one at a time doesn’t work nearly so well when it’s the whole class.
Feed back from my colleague teachers includes the need for me work on getting and maintaining the students’ attention (e.g. when giving instruction) as I have a tendency to try to talk over the top of them which doesn’t work very well as a) I’m not loud enough, and b) they aren’t listening. I also need to make sure that I keep them on task.
This post was written ex post facto.
]]>During the two periods between recess and lunch, we had maths and both classes went quite well. Some of the students got their assignments on perimeter, area, volume and surface area handed in, whilst others will [hopefully] have them finished for my colleague teacher’s return tomorrow. Many of the students that hadn’t finished managed to get it polished off, and all of them worked relatively well, so it was good.
During the final period, I took my first IT class. As the grade tens were attending a whole grade event, I had the ninth grade students from mine and two other classes. As it was a one-off, I took them through a Google Earth my colleague teacher had ready. The students has to locate a number of features ranging from relatively easy (just type it in a Google Earth will find it for you) to more challenging (such as streets in towns Google Earth doesn’t know about). All up I thought that it went pretty well, especially with the potential for disturbance posed by the mixture of three classes together.
After school ended there was a general staff meeting which, while interesting, I have no intention of writing about here.
]]>In the second lesson of the day, the science group continued thinking about gravity. In particular, they looked at the formula for the magnitude of the attraction between two masses and the role both the masses and the distance between them has in determining the force exerted. One thing that I’ll need to bear in mind during future science teaching is the utility of diagrams as a pedagogical device. Getting a student to draw a diagram of a situation and the forces at play really helped explain buoyancy to them.
During the C.A.D. lesson, the group finished off their current project and many of them began looking at SketchUp in anticipation of next week. Judging by their performance today, the next two or three weeks (I’m not sure if this class will be affected by the impending time table change) will be interesting for them and me both. If all goes well, there will soon be a few more objects in the Google 3D Warehouse.
]]>During the first two blocks, I got the opportunity to take part in a professional development session on anger management. The session was given by a community social worker based in a near by major town and focussed on a programme for boys with anger management problems and their families that the school will be joining next year. It was a great opportunity and I got a lot out of it, but I would have liked to hear more about specific strategies for helping students deal with their anger.
Between recess and lunch I was in the C.A.D. class I’ll start teaching next week. I managed to learn a few more names and I think that by the end of tomorrow, I’ll know most of the boys’ (the whole class is boys) names.
After lunch I spent the last two periods of the day planning for the IT class I’ll start teaching next week. I’m going to take them through a unit on computer hardware, common components of computer systems and the like. I’m pretty sure I know what I’ll cover and how I’ll present it, so it should work out pretty well. After I finished at the school, I went in to Ulverstone’s CBD and took a few photographs of buildings that I’ll take the C.A.D. class to see on their excursion.
I think that’s about it. I’ll have to remember to phone my university supervisor tomorrow.
]]>I think that the lesson could have gone better, but my colleague teacher was fairly happy with it. I would have liked it if they had been more interested in what I thought would be an interesting topic and activity, but they did seem to get what I wanted to teach out of it. The main thing that came out of it for me is that I still need to work on ways to manage students, particularly my voice. I speak and shout (in the “speak loudly” sense, of course) in from my throat and mouth rather than my chest, so talking for longer periods tends to give me a sore throat, never mind having to control a distracted class.
On the planning front, we’ve decided that I’ll need to get my unit on computer hardware for the IT class ready for us to review on Monday before I start teaching it next week. When I’m finished this post, I’m going to go and revise the plans for my Sketch Up unit to include some design theory content and a possible excursion and to fit in the shorter time span I’ll have to teach it.
I might have the opportunity to take part in a professional development activity on anger management tomorrow morning depending on spaces, etc., which will be good (though I’m not sure when I was last ‘angry’).
]]>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.
]]>During the first moderation session I was part of a group looking at work samples to be assessed for Being Numerate. We assessed a number of work samples from a class activity based on identifying patterns, finding rules and synthesising symbolic expressions of those rules. It was a relatively straightforward process and the group achieved consensus fairly easily in most of the cases.
During the second session, we looked as two work sampled assessed under Being Information Literate. As I experienced doing QMAP during PE1, everyone seems to have their own interpretation of the BIL standards and progression statements. The requirements about the safe, ethical, etc., use of information especially seems to cause much strife - why, some ask, should an other wise excellent piece of work be relegated to standard two just for a lack of referencing? In any case, it took us quite a while and a number of deviations from the QMAP protocol to come to a decision.
In the afternoon, I worked with a group of secondary teachers on “good questions” in numeracy. We used Bloom’s Taxonomy along with the Being Numerate standards to explore questions we might ask of, and explore with, students about the concepts of money and finance. The suggestions and discussions we had were quite interesting.
]]>We’ll see how things pan out. If possible, I’d like to integrate some of the above packages into a single whole. Haskore and one of the portable Haskell variants of Pan, for example, might be integrated with Pivotal to give a relatively simple environment for interactive, multi-media Haskell programming. Haskore, in particular, could benefit extraordinarily from such an integration: the student be able to “code”, visualise and listen to their musical compositions from the same program.
]]>The second class was another matter entirely. A number of them managed
to finish everything and I was