My absence from the blog this time round not too long ago was exceptionally long (or at least slightly longer than all the previous 'fake hiatuses' that I've tried to put in place) due to my final teaching practice that was just over on Friday.
Now that the whole 10 weeks is over, I can't be any more glad to announce that I'm finally a beginning teacher!
It's been an utmost period of trying and learning in the past 10 weeks. What I've learnt about being a teacher in this seemingly short 10 weeks seemed to have easily outweigh all that textbook knowledge that the uni's been trying to drill into our minds for the past 4 years.
I've experienced stress like I've not gone through in a very long while when the practice had just begun. While it was mainly individual responsibility (or group ones at most) back in pulau ntu, I now have to be responsible for the learning of so many little kiddos, whose minds are just like sponges, absorbing and picking up whatever information that is lying around, without going through much of a 'filtering process'. The thought of imparting the wrong grammatical, mathematical or even scientific concepts to the kids terrifies me. I would repeat a theory 10 times if that would help them remember a concept better, but what if the language I had used somehow caused some misinterpretation somewhere along the line? And what if that error stays in their minds for the subsequent 9 years, or worst, for the rest of their lives? How can I ever make it up to a kid who grows up thinking that one-tenth is greater than one-half? I can't! It's not possible to 're-write' the information on their minds like a DVD-RW.
It may be a little hard to imagine me in such a stressed mode since I'm usually too darned well-known for being lazy laid-back, but honestly, the pressure of having to do such detailed lesson plans on a frequent basis and preparation of lesson resources made it impossible not to feel the stress. On hindsight, I guess some of it was really self-imposed though.
So, blabbing aside, here's just a very quick summary of 2 of the more important things that kind of stuck:
1. You must fail before you can succeed
It really was a tough act (still is), trying to juggle lesson plans, classroom management and collection of homework. When I thought I had one of these three balls well under my thumb, something had to go wrong with the other two balls, somehow. It was so common that I would get one piece of positive feedback but two negative ones in return and that made my heart crumble a little each time. It was demoralizing, and I was disheartened, to say the least. I probably wouldn't have been that bothered though, if I hadn't been making adjustments to make things better, based on feedback from different sources and that made things a lot worse - it was still no avail despite already having act upon feedback - it could only mean that I really suck at this whole teaching business. Or like what I came to realize later on, maybe I'm not the only one who faces this problem. Sometimes, it takes more than one feeble try to get things right... this overused cliche's been repeated to death, but people will not fully grasp the meaning of it until he/she's experienced countless failures before finally seeing the first glimmers of success. I'm really glad to announce that I'm finally seeing the first signs of light - looking forward to the time when I will finally become an awesome juggler.
The Power of Affirmation
By virtue of my major at university, teaching English should have been the most enjoyable, if not easy of the three subjects that I took while on practicum. But it wasn't the case, not in the first few weeks at least. I'd never imagined that I would enjoy teaching Math and Science so much more than English. At one point, I felt so horrible that my kids did not understand the simple grammatical concepts and activities that I'd tried to conduct during lessons (mainly because I did not fully understand what the class ability was yet) that I began dreading going for English lessons altogether; feedback from my mentor was bad - whatever I tried to do was truly beyond the children's comprehension and they simply didn't see the rationale of things. Finally, I broke down in front of my mentor one afternoon, who must've really been taken aback at my supposed fragility. In contrast to the negative feedback that I'd been getting for English lessons, I discovered the powerful influence of affirmative words from other mentors for my other subjects. In short, it was an instant ego boost. It felt good to see personal efforts being recognized and paying off and that gave me some motivation to want to improve on my delivery for English as well. With some words of encouragement from Jenny and tips on how to improve my lessons, I later went on to enjoy the teaching of English again so much more. The learning point of this would be for me to remember what a little affirmation can do to boost oneself - Dear Ms Chang, please don't ever forget to praise your kids to affirm their commendable behaviour!
Apart from learning the 2 important lessons that I've just mentioned, I've also learnt to become (very) good friends with the risograph and photocopier; actually began having daily conversations with them so as to coax them into working well.
So yes, 10 weeks of learning, and more to go.
Let's go Ms Chang!
