Some days have been great, and others not so much. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say I don’t especially want to teach grade 7 anytime in the near future. As a group, they can be awful. Other teachers in the school keep telling me, “well at least your having this experience in your practicum so you’ll be prepared later”, and, “it’s a challenging group, but some of them aren’t so bad”. I’m trying not to have a grass is greener mentality, but I keep thinking how wonderful it would be to have a lovely grade 6 class right about now.

But there have been some nice moments. On Friday I taught a poetry lesson that they found really engaging, about slam poetry, music lyrics and hip hop (I took some ideas from this lesson I found online). After playing the ‘Hip hop or Shakespeare game’, one boy actually said, “can we go back to the beginning and play again? Maybe we will have forgotten the answers”. This was also the first time we were actually able to have a class discussion about a ‘real’ topic where students were contributing thoughtful and insightful comments. Several students had interesting things to say about consumerism and equality, and the rest of the class actually listened to them. This is a big deal for us. I think the lesson here is to engage them with topics that are relevant to their own lives. Embed music, fashion, pop culture as much as possible. If only I could think of a way to do this for spelling or math, I think this would happen more often. As their assignment, they have to choose a song, and then write a rationale as to why they think the lyrics should be considered poetry. I’m very excited to read what they wrote.

Now for what didn’t go so well this week. Shotput/Discus was not my best PE lesson. I didn’t organize the groups well enough, so there were too many students standing around with nothing to do too often. My math lesson for an observation with my FA did not go too smoothly. The technology failed and the activity I planned did not work exactly as I thought. I have to review a few of the concepts, because many students didn’t understand. Writing mothers day poems was difficult for the students- I had to do a lot of handholding, despite giving them lots of ideas and templates to work with. There are probably more, but those were the major problems. We also had 3 TOCs, and I even had to teach band one day because the band TOC was at the wrong school. Yes. Me. I taught band (it was actually really fun, there’s something thrilling about standing at the front of an ‘orchestra’ and commanding them to play for you).

Next week is going to be busy. We are going to Playland on Tuesday, which could be really fun or a complete nightmare. I’m hoping for the former.

Here are a couple pictures I took of some students mothers day cards they made using screen-printing techniques. I thought some of them turned out quite well.