Extra-curricular Benefits

This topic came up as a part of a discussion my associate teacher and I had.

We were discussing the ideas of teaching and also how students relate to teachers who they are engaged with outside of the classroom. Their is sometime a social threshold that is exhibited in those teachers who engage in extra-curricular activities involving students. This threshold relates the respect level that students have for the teacher, and the degree to which a teacher can be comfortable with the students and still retain that level of respect. The associate teacher had encouraged me to try helping out with the intramurals that were going on in the gym, and I quickly found out the benefits.

This week, I was instructing a classroom and one of the students had recognized me from playing in the gym. It was an interaction that had not only helped me to get to know the students on another level, but for them to recognize me as something other than a teacher, but still in a respectful manner.

Motivating the unmovable

What does it take? How much is too much?

These are questions that had me pondering after the first week of practicum. What does it take to encouraging kids/students to want to try? It sometimes seems like they have packed it in, and they are only in Gr. 11. When did we give up on them? When did they give up on themselves? And what can be done?

It would seem we would cover something like this within our Educational Psychology course, but not as of yet. It is tough too as well, because in order to maintain your classroom and move the materials along, you almost have to leave some kids behind. This works in a class that doesn't have work/information that builds, but in a classroom where it does, what about those left behind?

How much can you offer of yourself, without sacrificing yourself?

Practically there

Its been a full week in my school, and it has been an awesome experience. There are not nearly enough ways to prepare yourself for stepping in front of a classroom, except knowing your materials and finding that link between your audience and the topic for the day.

The invisible roads that are drawn inbetween ideas and individual's concepts are so tough to make. In the weeks we are "submersed" in a school, it is extremely challenging to make those connections or help the students create them. It seems we are here to go through the following within our first practicum:

• Learn the "ways" of the school
• Compare to our experience of our own high school growing up
• Discover what its like standing in front of a class

In those three items alone, it takes the three weeks we do spend at the school to get adjusted. Only near the end of the practicum session, I learned there is more to teaching than this. The "life force" of the staff; the engaging of the students beyond the classroom; the challenges of balancing life outside of the school with that of your job. Its rewarding and challenging all at once.