Lessons Learnt from My Practice Teaching
Field experience is very important for anyone achieving a career and has to be hands-on and is front and center of the job they are choosing. If you don’t see what is to come how will you be prepared for it? Well, that’s what field experience is for, it's to help you decide if you want to continue the same major or switch before it’s too late. Some people stay in a career that they end up hating because no one told them what to expect or there was little to no field experience. So it’s important to send people on-field experience especially if they are choosing a challenging career.
Throughout this course, there were many different topics we discussed and explained in-depth. For example the objectives I noticed that it seems most lecturers have their own way of teaching them and want them in a specific way. The ABCD style was new to me and I had a hard time trying to create objectives using those. In the end, I used the one the Principal of the school wanted because that one I was used to and I was able to achieve them easier.
Being an educator is a lot of work and takes up a lot of your time so doing this practice teaching onsite was something that totally opened my eyes as to how much dedication you must have to want to be a teacher. For example, the way we set up our classroom is very important because some lessons require the children to be fully attentive or need space to move around, especially if they need to dramatize a skit. We are to ensure everything runs smoothly, we are like principal conductors and our classrooms are orchestras playing beautiful symphonies because we conduct them properly. Watching videos of how teachers teach is one thing but actually conducting a lesson and having the children behave rudely, talk out of turn, and ensure that you hit every part of your lesson plan within a time frame is very overwhelming. The children we got were a standard 2 level, however, they still were acting very infantile and had no discipline at all. So it's not as easy as it seems, this experience made me think about what I need to have ready for my internship come September of the next year 2023. Definitely have to work on my classroom management skills because during this practice teaching I didn't exercise it enough but when I have my own classroom I know I must incorporate it. It is necessary to enforce my rules and procedures because when I'm visited by the principal or my supervisor from UB I need to show that I can be able to have my own classroom.
This is not a cheap profession especially if you want every child to participate and learn the lessons. The school we picked is limited in resources and the students are from low-income households to get them to bring supplies was impossible, so for my internship, I need to have all the supplies available for them in order for my lesson to flow smoothly. The different props helped a lot when explaining the lesson I made a puppet of an alligator for the "greater and less than" topic and in that lesson, they had a lot of fun. Overall I now know what it takes to be a teacher and how much you spend, how much you have to enforce certain things, and that overall you need a lot of patience with a slow class.