Confusion, being overwhelmed, nervousness... these were the dominant emotions during the first few days of the semi-final teaching practice (TP). Especially those students who had never taught before were really struggling to find all the information necessary. It all seemed to require so much work!
Simon Abib was posted to a primary 3 class. It didn’t take long for him to realise that if the teacher is nice to the pupils, they will then in return be good to him as well. He most enjoyed singing and generally interacting with the children. Learning about them and how to handle them was part of the experience. He came to the conclusion that the children all in all love their teachers and openly show it.
At the same time, Simon was challenged by the planning of the lessons and organising the teaching and learning aids took a lot of effort. As the number of children in the classes is big, class control becomes difficult and tiresome. Marking the children’s books took a lot of time and they would really complain if he didn’t manage to mark all of them. The pupils were very eager to have their books marked first and sometimes even ended up quarrelling right beside the teacher. Since they are only using one book for all their subjects, it was very important for them to get their books back as fast as possible.
Having talked about children’s psychology in Professional Education Studies at the college, this helped greatly to handle the individual differences and funny reactions of the pupils. The children sometimes answered questions in their mother tongue or just generally gave very direct comments about their feelings and opinions. Every now and then, some would doze off only to be woken up by their friends through a gentle touch on their closed eyes with a pen. This then would cause a lot of laughter.
In planning the lessons, the knowledge from Social Studies about combining different books to collect enough information was very helpful. Simon also appreciated the English sounds and pronunciation classes. As he returns to the course work at the college, he hopes to learn more methods on how to control the class. He is very interested in getting to know more games, songs or stories.
Simon really enjoyed his teaching practice and the emotions mentioned in the beginning only came back when the tutors came for supervision. He was surprised to see how much supervision can disorganise the student teachers. However, practice makes perfect.
By Simone Illi
March 2012