Practicum and Naked Men

Monday, February 22, 2010

Before I start off, I just want to say that today was a really good day.


My day started with me waking up at 6:30 am for my first day of practicum. It was somewhat easy to get up this morning, but it took me awhile to get ready. After I got ready, I met Morgan down in the lobby so we could head out to our practicum. It took us one tube transition and a 20 minute walk to get to our practicum. The commute isn’t that bad, but the rain kind of made uncomfortable. Interesting story: On the way to the tube station near our flats, Morgan and I were walking with another TF when we got splashed on by a car going through a puddle. It was exactly like in the movies, but in a smaller version. The whole right side of my khakis became soaked, along with some of my shirt. The cold didn’t really help the situation at all. The whole combination did not make a great start to the day.
Once we got to our school, everything started getting better. In other words, my whole first day was really good. I was placed in a Numbers Class (Algebra II equivalent class), an Algebra Class (Year 8), a geometry class, and an economics class. Overall, I enjoyed my classes, but I did have a couple of issues. The first one was that the algebra class, which was made up of 11 year olds, was extremely disorganized and the teachers had trouble controlling the kids. Granted, they are 11 year olds and tend to be really energetic, but the lack of control was very distracting and frustrating. Second, the teaching method in the school is not effective in my eyes. In the three math classes, I noticed that the teachers kind of just tell the kids the stuff they need to know and don’t really get the gears working in the students’ heads. For example, my first class, the algebra II equivalent class, the teacher was doing trigonometric ratios. The basic lesson was using the trig ratios to find angles and sides of right triangles. When he got to a harder set of problems, he assigned the class to do the example. So, I went around to help some of the kids who were struggling. There was one particular girl who was having trouble, and I decided to lend her some help. The problem consisted of finding the hypotenuse of the triangle (She was given the angle and the opposite side). This meant that she had the following problem: sin(30)= 10/h. I encountered this problem frequently in my tutoring so I knew how to explain it. I started off with the usual question of what she needed to do. She answered it correctly. Then, I asked her what her thoughts were on how to get to the answer. She really didn’t know, and I decided to help her out a little with leading questions. These didn’t help, and I ended up having to give her the answer. After I was done with that, the teacher went over the question. He just went through the answer and didn’t really give the students the chance to try. It was kind of upsetting. The last thing I had difficulties with was just the math system itself. This will probably go away once I know what all the levels are, but for now it is a constant annoyance.
After practicum and class that followed, I went to my second play for my theatre class. The play was called Six Degrees of Separation, and it revolves around a strange man named Paul and his interactions with the other characters. Overall, I really liked the play. It was extremely funny and very intriguing. It really helped that I read it beforehand because we had a lot of advance warnings on things. I can’t wait for the discussion tomorrow.

My whole day ended on the most perfect note. I found out that I don’t have class tomorrow until 12:45 and I don’t have class on Thursday. I also had a delicious twix bar, some really good pasta, some toast and olive oil, and really good ice cream. It was just a fantastic day today.
Until Next Time,
Jefe