reflection on fri's class

i love the weekend. saturday has officially replaced friday as my favourite day....thanks to the very unkind timetabling of our lessons.

as you can tell, i don't do much work over the weekends.

Friday's microteaching. i must say i've led a very (not semi, but very) charmed life when it comes to my previous teaching experiences. i've had no major scenes enacted in my class like those that Chan Ying encountered. here, i join everyone in giving her a big pat on her back for being so brave to enter uncharted waters and for doing a good job too.

my thoughts are similar to the rest of the comments put forth so far. to me, teaching is like writing an essay. a lot of thought goes into it, you do thorough research, you write drafts (if you have the luxury of time) and you have to constantly remind yourself of the essay question so as not to go off tangent.

and just like any essay, the introduction and conclusion are just as important....to (mis)quote a lovable and very senior NUS geog professor, you can't have a salmon head with a mackeral body that has a tail of a different fish...(binary opposite, if you can remember what he said exactly, help me out here!), in other words, everything has to link up nicely.

i thought Chan Ying's use of the postcards and the topic of discussion was a brilliant idea (more so when she had to surreptitiously take them from Cold Storage). but yes, i agree with the rest of the class in that a proper introduction could have been given, with the lesson objectives and perhaps also highlight the concepts that she might want us to pick up.

my CT during school experience constantly reminded her class about the concepts or key terms related to tourism and i thought that was good.

also, a rounding-up of the lesson would have been good too, sort of to revise with the class what they had learnt from the group work? could get the students to think and contribute on their own the pointers/concepts they had picked up.

one good practice i noted during my observation in schools so far is that some teachers keep a close eye on the clock, and when they realise they do not have sufficient time to complete the lesson, they move to an impromptu conclusion to reiterate what he/she has done with the class for the day.... never mind if they were not able to complete the entre lesson as planned.

to her credit, i think Chan Ying put in a commendable effort, perhaps her nerves were too frayed nearing the end of the lesson, thus affecting the quality of her conclusion. also, her train of thought must have been badly derailed by wesley's mention of JB right at the start such that her introduction was affected :)

that said, my turn is coming up in less than 2 weeks. sigh! like liyan, i find myself thinking about what i should do for the lesson even when i'm not officially "working"! after friday's very horrific turn of events, i am all the more apprehensive about my turn, stressing myself out by imagining all the worst possible scenarios that the class can throw at me!