First Practicum Review

Welcome back! 

(I’m talking to myself here) 

Ok, so I took a bit of a blog hiatus while I was on my first practicum. There are three major reasons for this: 

1) Practicum was intense guys. I worked my tush off for the past 3 weeks and was exhausted all the time. 

2) Contrary to the implication made by this post’s time stamp, I like to blog in the morning. I’m far more productive in pretty much every aspect of life in the morning. During practicum I arrived at my school at 8:30 each morning, so there was no blogging to be done in the AM. 

3) My number one blog supporter (my brother) was without internet until last week, so I felt that my awesome posts could wait until my promoter was back behind his desk. 

So practicum. My first taste of being a real academic teacher. It was so GREAT! I loved every day that I was there! Even the PD day where I sat in meetings that had nothing to do with me all day long. I was paired with a 6^th grade teacher. The intrinsic motivation of those kids was dizzying. They were so keen on finishing their work in class to avoid having homework, they would stay in for recess when needed. 

“Miss, I can’t work on that tonight because I have (hockey, dance, piano, soccer…).” 

This was a sentence I heard multiple times a day, and my response was always “Well you had better work on it now then.” 

So they did! 

It was incredible! They did what they needed to do so that their nights were theirs’ to do with what they must. 

I had such a sweet group of kids too. More than once my teacher told me if I had been assigned to her class last year, I would have dropped out of the program. But these kids were so kind and sooo funny! I taught one period of drama, during their weekly installment of “the arts,” in which I split the class into groups of 5, gave each group a statement, and gave them 10 minutes to make up a skit about their statement. Upon completion, each group was given the opportunity to present their skit in front of the whole class. 

They were all adorable (especially the ones that obviously ran out of prep time before they were ready) and very funny. My favourite skit was based on the statement “This has nothing to do with me; I’m staying out of it.” which ended up being a hilariously terrible example of what to do when you see someone being bullied. Similarly, the skit entitled “It’s not my fault” ended up being a story of a boy breaking a window with a tennis ball and successfully pinning it on someone else. Not the greatest outcomes on a moral compass, but very entertaining to watch. 

My major teaching block while in practicum was the healthy eating unit. If you know me outside of the blogging community, you’ll know how mismatched that topic is to my personal life. The great thing about that though, is that I actually know quite a bit about healthy eating, I just choose not to practice it all that often in my personal life. So I wasn’t entirely fish-out-of-water-esque, I just chuckled silently about the hypocrisy of it all. 

It all came full circle on my last day of practicum though. My kids threw me a going away party, because they are such sweet kids (and the teacher made it clear that it was all the kids, she was just authorizing their ideas), and since I taught them an entire unit on healthy eating, they brought in all healthy snacks. So, there I was, eating slices of cucumber, celery sticks, and cherry tomatoes, and using every effort I could muster to pretend to love it. 

Fortunately, I’m a good actor. 

Now off I go to four more weeks of university classes before my next practicum. I can’t wait to see what type of kids I’ll be given this time around!