from Practicum

#1

MacNeill has what is known as an Advisory class right in the middle of every day before lunch. The interesting thing about Advisory is that in grade 8, a group of students are assigned to a single teacher. For the next 5 years that same group of students stay together with the same teacher for Advisory class. The goal is to create a comfortable environment and relationship between students and teacher, where students can feel safe and get help when needed involving school and possibly life situations.

Advisory runs for almost 30 minutes every day and what happens within depends on the teacher. Some teachers have the students do silent reading of the book of their choice. Most teachers however let the students to self study/homework.

#2

On the last friday, I dressed up as Geordi LaForge for Halloween. All the other student teachers said they'd dress up too but most bailed out. I was extremely dissapointed. However, my outfit was awesome and I was pleasantly surprised how many people knew the Star Trek Reference. One of my sponsor teachers even dressed up as Captain Kirk! We would have taken the prize if there was a staff costume contest.

Aside: I went to a conference earlier in the week about the adolecent brain and apparently adolecents do not read facial expressions the same way as adults...

On that day I got to supervise a math test with a TOC. One of the students, I got along well with but he completely bombed the test. During the test he asked me a question which I couldn't answer for him because of the test. Then he starting saying how poorly he was doing and how he really did study. In my mind I wanted to help but couldn't. On my face I had what I considered my pained want to help but can't expression.

What the student said to me was, "Mr. Thiessen, don't laugh."

Prime example of misreading of expressions.

On a different note, the class before I ran a review session. I prepared a practice test which covered all the material needed. If you could do this test you could do the test no problem. I gave them the numerical answers at the end of the hand out and even posted an answer key at the front of class with detailed solutions. What surprised me was even with an exam lingering 2 days away, students do not suddenly become more motivated to do math. Lesson learned.

Also, it doesn't matter if you are in grade 10, 11, or 12, there will be students who don't know how to graph y=mx+b