Another Side

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After school, I was told that there would be badminton games. I decided to watch because I knew some of my adorable grade 8s were on the team. I had never really went to a badminton game that was held at school, so I did not really know what to expect. I saw some little kids and their parents sitting on the bench. I saw a few students stood by the door to watch the games. There were a few teachers that came by to take a peek too.

It was fun to see the students’ active side. I got to talk to a few of them while I was watching too. I was cheering for one of my students when she played. It was quite an exciting game. I enjoyed watching her played too because in one of her written responses, she told me that in order to see her “evil”/”monster” side, I needed to watch her play sports. Haha. She asked me if that was why I went to watch the badminton games. Partly, yes. I like to students in another environment, other than the classrooms. However, I also want to support them. I think a few of my students were surprised to see that I got excited when she scored. They were laughing at me and said “miss lui”. haha. I enjoyed letting my students see the other side of me too. Outside of the classroom, I could be just like them, cheering for someone that they like or their friends. 🙂

2 Weeks After Spring Break

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There are a few things that I need to continue to work on:
Instruction (I think I improved, but I could still give clearer instruction.)
Classroom management (phones! It was hard for me to be mean, but I tried. It worked! Many students do not use their phones as much now in my ESL level 3 class.)
Questioning (Refer back to Bloom’s Taxonomy! After attending the Pro-d ESL session, I have learned to include the specific vocabulary to question my students. By constantly using evaluate, assess or similar vocabulary in my questions, students will be more comfortable to answer the questions once they advance to the next level.)
Detailed lesson plan ( to identify the different types of assessment in my lesson plan and provide better intro and closure)
There are just two weeks left. I have to try my very best.

I got to attend a few teacher-parent conferences.  I just jotted down some notes about students’ strengths and weaknesses. I also prepared some students’ homework and projects in case the parents wondered what they were doing for assignments or in class.  I think I did a pretty decent preparation considering it was my first time to talk to the different parents. I learned quite a lot from my sponsor teachers. They would discuss both strengths and weaknesses of the students. They would also provide some suggestions to help the students improve, such as telling the parents about the peer-tutoring program or offering to check the student’s agenda each day to make sure they have written down the homework. It was quite interesting because I thought the parents might only want to know how their children were doing. However, no, they would also want to know if the students would do well next year. It was a fruitful night for me! Now I can a full picture of how to present a full report to the parents.

I had my last class with my grade 8s. My workload would be reduced down to 2. It was a relief because I got kind of burn out. At the same time, I could not imagine the following weeks without seeing the energetic cute grade 8 students. After I greeted them and they responded with “good morning, miss lui”, I told myself to remember this moment; it would be the last time I heard this choir-like adorable greetings. Before I asked students to provide individual feedback for me, they had a group activity to compare and contrast the book and the movie. It was interesting how much they disliked the movie. I would love to have more discussions or activities with the movie, but I just did not have much time. For example, I would love to have my students enact a scene or create a trailer as a project. In this case, they can further apply ethos, pathos and logos. They can also learn other skills, such as editing a video clip, inserting a background music into a video or adding captions. It would be so much fun. Oh well, I can leave all these ideas when I have my own class. After the group activity, they wrote down some feedback for me! 😀

Let’s review my grade 8 Humanities
I thought of Freier’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In my humanities 8 classes, I tried not to spoon feed materials to my students. I do not want to treat my students as passive objects which I can fill them with knowledge and call that teaching. I think I have taken the initiative to create a dialogue with my students to discuss the different topics that revolved around the novel. I listened to their perspectives and learned how they formed these ideas; meanwhile, they learned some information from me. This was a two-way contribution. I also thought that by asking them to provide an expectation of me before I taught them and give me some feedback after I taught them allowed me to reflect my teaching strategies. I knew which activity they liked and which lesson was the most memorable for them. A few students were mature and observant enough to tell me what I needed to work on, such as better classroom management. I appreciated all of the honest sincere comments. It was interesting how students could really feel if you enjoyed teaching or not because that was what they told me in their feedback. 🙂

A Week Before Spring Break

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Mid-point Meeting with my SAs and FA
The mid-point meeting was quite positive. I learned a lot from my sponsor teachers’ feedbacks as well as my faculty advisor’s. I will have to focus on developing my teacher-talk and building the school community outside of the classroom. Assessment will be another area that I am still figuring it out: to incorporate as, of, for learning assessment.

School Based Team Meeting
I had a school based team meeting to talk about one of my students who was apparently failing Maths and Science. I did not really know how it worked, so I was kind of excited to participate in it. Basically, every teacher that the student has classes with will go to the meeting. The counsellor began by passing out the student’s report cards to teachers, so we had an idea of how he was doing in other classes. Then, the counsellor would ask individual teachers for comments about that student. I contributed a little by describing how he behaved in my Humanities class. I did see him in another light, which was in the ESL 3 class. He would be more active and more engaged in the activities. I guess his confidence level contributes to how he behaves in class. I am not really sure how to help him to gain more confidence in Humanities.

ESL 1/2 Level Observation
My students used the new adjectives that they learned from last class to describe their hometowns and presented it. Everyone did a good job. I was impressed by how detailed and how much effort they put into preparing for their presentations. Everyone encouraged each other; it was a supportive classroom. I had fun during this class too. I learned a lot about their hometowns and where they came from. I was also surprised by the amount of first language they spoke during class. The social contracts were working or the fact that I told them about my teacher’s observation scare them! 🙂 The class went relatively well. However, in the upcoming classes, I will have to limit the access of cell phones and my usage of filler-words, such as yes.

ESL After-school program
After class, my students asked if I passed and what did my teacher say. Haha, they were so cute like that. It was so caring and nice of them to ask though. Afterwards, I prepared a few paragraphs for them to look for potential mistakes. The process was funny because there were mistakes that they could have easily caught but they missed. Then, the class taught me a fun game that could help students with their oral skills. It was similar to The Killer, but we needed to guess who were the spies based on the descriptive sentences they told. I enjoyed that game, but some of the students were bad actors and liars. It was so obvious to spot who were the spies. 😀 Great game though!

Managing a class is HARD!

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After a week of experiencing full load, I was relieved that it was not as hard as I imagined. Day 2 was a bit hectic because I barely had any rest in between classes. However, I enjoy seeing my students every day.

Today my Humanities 8 students finished their essays. It would be exciting for me to read their thoughts. Hopefully, they successfully applied the OREO into their writing. Here I come, a stack of essays! 🙂 Rubric in left hand, and red pen in right. I am ready to go.

My ESL level 3 class got a bit better. Students were engaged with the discussion. I asked them to tell me the differences and similarities between schools in their hometowns and Vancouver. The grade 8s were stomping on the ground or moving close to me to get me pick them. It was a little bit overwhelming. I was not used to such pressure. It was hard to get the grade 8s calm down; at the same time, it was difficult to get the quieter students from other grades to speak up. I guess it would take me some time to manage the class better. I must say I need to be more aware of how the students behave while conducting the class activity. There were two grade 8 boys who were so excited that they started to sit on the desk to get my attention. It was not too dangerous, but it would not be that acceptable. Nevertheless, it was a good discussion. Students opened up to the class to talk about their own experiences, such as how they got made fun of after they made a mistake when they spoke. It was unfortunate. I shared about my experience too. I guess we could relate to one another. 🙂  It was nice to have students so willingly and openly to talk about their thoughts.

My ESL1/2 students are so adorable. Two of them offered snacks to me during class. One was a chicken spring roll, and another was a handful of chips. Good stuff! 🙂 I decided to set up some class rules with them, so they would know what I expected in class. Being a bilingual teacher could be a blessing and a curse. Once students discovered that I could speak in Chinese, they would want to converse in Chinese. Therefore, I needed to come up with a rule that everyone should speak in English except for a corner in the classroom. I hope it will work. Experiment time! I had some one-on-one time with level 1 students today. I sat with them to talk about their tasks. However, since I was so focused on helping the level 1s, I forgot about the 2s. The 2s were not on task, and I thought they would. I may have to come up with a better plan to circulate around the class to get them focus.

Detecting OREO

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O – opinion
R – reason
E – example
O – opinion

This was an acronym that I used with my Hums 8 to get them practice with their persuasion. I thought the acronym was cute, so the grade 8s might have an easier time remembering what each letter stood for.

I began the class by asking them if they were good at persuading or arguments. A few raised up their hands and nodded. I asked them if they could show the class how they persuaded their parents. They tried to demonstrate, but they could not really show us the realistic scenario. I told them I had a formula to help them be persuasive. I handed out the OREO worksheet. I explained how it could be used. Then I gave them two murder cases for them to solve. They needed to use OREO to convince me of their suspects. It was nice to see the quieter class being so loud and engaged into the discussion. They were excited to talk about the tiny details they noticed in the pictures. It was a joy for me to see them so actively participating. After the detective cases, they needed to choose a villain and convince me of the villain was actually not as evil as some of the movies or stories portrayed. They did it in pairs. I looked over all of their work and decided that we probably would not be able to move on to talking about introduction and conclusion tomorrow. They did have a brief idea on how to use the OREO as a model to shape their argument. However, I thought their reasons and examples had not met my standard yet.  As a result, I came up with another lesson plan to talk more about OREO tomorrow in preparation for their upcoming essay. I wanted them to practice more on how to write persuasively and how their examples needed to be more specific.

My 80% Started…

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I re-adjusted my lesson for my Hums 8. I wrapped up The Outsiders by talking about the themes with them. I came up with an activity that could help them think about the different themes critically. Each group chose a theme that they wanted to work with. They needed to come up with a statement about the theme. Then, each group member picked a role: they could either be a quote finder, a connector or a questioner. Each role had specific responsibility. For example, the quote finder needed to look for specific quotes from the novel to support their statement. The connector tried to relate the statement or the theme back to our lives by providing some realistic examples. The questioner came up with questions about the theme or the relation between the theme and the novel. I tried to explain the instruction as clearly as possible. I also provided them with a handout that listed out the steps and the responsibilities of each role. In this case, they could always refer back to the handout when they did not understand anything. After the groups completed the quadrant, they would go to a different group to read and add onto the other group’s quadrant. The activity went fairly well, and I think the students got a much better idea when I had some instructions on board or/and on the handouts. At the end, each group needed to present the quadrant, telling the class how the theme they chose was one of the big ideas in the novel.

I started my ESL 1/2 class today. I was excited to teach them because I felt connected to them. Their situation reminded me of my experience in the ESL program. I knew how hard it was for them to be there; therefore, I tried to make my lessons fun. At the same time, I wanted them to learn while participating in the games or activities. I felt I under-planned my first lesson because we had quite some time left after I taught. Anyways, the class started off very well. We played a simple game that helped students bond with one another. We formed a circle. Everyone was sitting down in the circle except for one person. That one person stood in the middle and told the class a statement. The statement needed to get the sitting students to relate to it. For example, if the middle person said, “everyone who has glasses”, then students who were wearing glasses needed to stand up and find another seat to sit. In that environment, students were more willing to speak. One of the quietest students participated, and she spoke in her own words. She did not even need my help to translate. I was proud of her. They had fun playing that game. After that, I asked them how did they form those statements. I told them that it did not seem like you knew each other very well because all of the statements were about appearance. I explained what appearance meant. Then, I used that as a way to get them interview one another. Basically this lesson was aimed to get them knowing about their classmates. I prepared some questions for them to interview one another. Then, each group needed to introduce their partners to the class. They were more comfortable to speak in class than I imagined. They knew much more than I expected. Therefore, the interviews and introductions went fairly quickly.

It was a good start of my full load! 🙂

Heroism

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When I was teaching the grade 8s on heroism earlier this week, I did not realize I was actually on a heroic journey until now.

The BEd program is like the threshold that I have just crossed, and the different challenges I face during my practicum are the trials that a hero will face. Let me walk you through my heroic journey so far.

1. Ordinary World
2. The Call to Adventure
I always know I want to become a teacher. I know this is God’s vision for me. Therefore, I applied for the BEd program. I decided to give it a try to see if this was really what God wanted me to do. Since I got in, I guess God was leading me onto this path that He prepared for me.

3. Refuse the Call
My lovely home. My warm bed. My after-undergrad-travelling-adventure.

I was travelling around Europe before I got into the BEd program. There was a moment I just wanted to travel around as a “teacher” (since I did have my TESL certificate, which meant I could probably land myself a job somewhere). I did try to refuse the call of going back to UBC for the BEd. My mum even convinced me to just teach without the degree. 

4. Helper
My fellow classmates, my best friends in the program, have been helping me out a lot. They encourage me to stay positive when I encounter some difficulties. Also, it is nice to be around with so many people who have the passion and desire to educate and care for the teenagers. They are helping me to get through this stressful time of the year. Of course, my family and my boyfriend also help me along the way to try to cross the threshold. They told me that I would be a great teacher, and I was meant to be one.

5. Crossing the Threshold. Entering the practicum.

6. Trials
Right now I am going through different big and small challenges.
1. I thought I lost the school key after two weeks into the practicum. Luckily, I found it in my laundry bag. I have learned to be more careful.
2. I thought it was difficult to make copies. Now I think it is the easiest thing to do on Earth.
3. This poor behaviour kid in my class starts to open up to me. He even handed in his homework a day earlier than the due date.
4. The ESL kids started to hand in their homework after I gave them the adjusted assignments. They will look for help if they do not understand.
5. 4 weeks ago, I did not know how to drive to Richmond from my home. Now I know how to do so. Indeed, I am very comfortable with the idea of myself driving alone.

I am sure there are more trials I have faced/ am going to face; however, I am not afraid. I know after I go through all these different trials, I will become a new Kelly. I will have a new role which is Miss Lui. I cannot wait to have my own classroom and decorate it the way I want.

Front-loading = My Homework

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Based on the comments my FA and SA made, I think I may have to front-load my grade 8 students a lot more than I expected. This is definitely the homework I need to learn for the remaining few weeks.

1. Mock Trial
It was my first time to organize a mock trial. I was setting the mock trial up as a vehicle to get students think in the perspective of the characters. It was also a way for them to think about this question: could violence ever be justified?
I allowed my students to pick their roles, so that they would be more eager to participate. However, from this activity, I knew that it might be a better idea for me to assign their roles. There were a certain boys who could never be grouped together because if they were in the same group, there would be chaos. I really need to come up with some creative ways to group the students. It is a small class, so there are not many varieties. Seeing how the students were more comfortable when they were sitting on the floor, I really had the desire to just move all the chairs and desks away. However, I could only change the classroom setting once in a while. Anyway, let’s get back to the mock trial. I did not really provide my students a whole lot of information about the mock trial. I gave them a script to begin the trial and told them the responsibilities of their roles. I did not really prep the students on how to object or how to ask appropriate questions. And both of my SA and FA thought I could have done that, so the trial would run a lot smoother. Nonetheless, considering it as my first “trial”, I thought I did a good job. I thought the discussion went fairly well.

2. Talk Show
I had my students discussed some of the questions from chapter 10, 11 and 12 in a more interesting way. I divided them into groups, and gave them some guiding questions to help them to stay on task. The objective was to get students think about the questions and presented them in an entertaining way for their fellow classmates. I got the idea of a talk show from one of the ubc classes I had. I did not really know how to execute it when I read the brief description from the textbook. And yet, I thought it was a great idea to try it when my FA was coming in to observe. As a result, the lesson was not as fantastic as I imagined it to be. I would not say it was a total failure because some students could still accomplish the task. It was just that I did not give them clear guidance as to how I wanted the talk show to be like. Again, I did not front-load my students enough, which was the critique I got from both of my SA and FA. On my part, I could have done more research on it, so that I knew how other teachers had executed it before I tried.

That day was the first day I cried because of the BEd program. I tried very hard not to cry, but it was difficult. Tears just kept sliding across my cheek. However, I would not give up that easily. I will rebound from this to tackle the lack of front-loading problem. For the following week, I am going to front load my students as much as possible to get them prepare for writing a persuasive paper. Let’s see if I get accomplish this another trial of my teaching journey.

Bonding with the Kids

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Today was by far the greatest moment of my teacher’s life.

I organized some activities for my Hums 8 students to do. The activities were just aids to help them imagine themselves in the character’s situation. After the activities, we had a little discussion about the activity. We talked about the impact of inequality, especially focusing on the stratification of social class. It was interesting how the discussion somehow moved to a direction that I did not intend. It showed that students were the driving force of the discussion. We talked about bullying. It was one of the big themes in The Outsiders, and it was an important issue to discuss. Therefore, I did not stop students from talking. They were so excited to respond. They were talking about how bullying could not really be stopped. I asked them if telling an adult would help the situation. Many of the students surprisingly told me that teachers did not care. I was surprised by the response. I did not understand. Therefore, I asked why they said teachers did not care if someone got bullied. Apparently, in another class, they tried to complain to a teacher about a bully. However, the teacher did not take any action. The teacher might have told the student to stop; nonetheless, no further action had been taken. It was sad to hear. It was even more upsetting to hear that the students did not think teachers would do anything against bullying. I was happy that they were so willingly and openly to tell me about it. I was not sure how I could help. I could only tell them that I would not allow such thing in my class.

I was also happy that the discussion happened in my quieter class instead of the louder one. I felt like I connected with them more because of the discussion. I felt we bonded after this. Hopefully this would last. I want to know more about them. I want them to know that I will be here for them if they need me. It was also heartwarming that the kid who usually behaved poorly in my class said something like it was mean to ask when miss lui would leave since I told them we would have a pot-luck before I go. I did not expect him to say something like that. Even though that did not seem to mean much, I was happy to hear him say that. Ahhhh kids.

In my last block, we played a little game before I would take over the class. It was fun. The students would ask me join their group. They even suggested to name the group after me. One student was funny. He told me that we were friends, so I needed to tell him what was “hula-chuan”(hula-hoop) in English. Another student said that the would sit over here because I was sitting at this particular table. I just hope once I take over the class, they would not be hating me for giving them assignments. Right now we are on good terms, but who knows….After a month or so, they may be complaining how boring my class is. 😛 I had a good laugh with them though because they were not afraid to be goofy. They are just adorable kids. I think I am in love…in love with my job, with my students.

Reflection of the second week

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The remaining three school days of the week past rather quickly.

On Wednesday, we wrote police reports and news articles based on an incident in the novel. The purpose of the activity was to get students think in another perspective. I divided the first class into 2 and gave them different assignments: one group with police reports and the other group with news template. However, they quickly finished the assigned tasks. The only thing I could do was to encourage them to do the other assignment that they did not do. After they were done with both tasks, they could either read the next chapter or start writing their journal entries.  I decided to change the format for the second class because of the speediness that the previous class demonstrated. I asked the whole second class to be objective and constructed a police report. In this case, they were only noting down what was said in the novel. After that, I randomly distributed the completed police report to another group. The class needed to create a news according to the assigned police report. In this case, I told the class that they might exaggerate some of the information that was missing from the police report to make it more entertaining because that was what some news reporters do. I think the second class had more fun. The benefit of having back-to-back classes is allowing me to quickly adjust my lesson  if something does not work with the first class. 🙂

On Thursday, we discussed the relationship between the protagonist, Ponyboy and his brothers, Darry and Sodapop. Before that, I asked the two classes to summarize chapter 3 for me. However, it was a lot harder for the quieter class to respond. There were only 2 students who might “dare” to answer. There are a few students who have already finished the novel. Also, most of them did read the chapter because their journal entries clearly indicated that. Therefore, I wondered why they did not really speak in class. My SA pointed out to me that I might have to address them by names in order to get a response out of them. I was not sure if that was a good idea. When I was a student, I disliked teacher called out particular student to answer a question. Anyways, after summarizing, the class needed to come up with quotes that described the relationships. Then the class wrote a letter in the perspective of Sodapop or Darry to Ponyboy. I photocopied some pretty letter papers for them, and I think some students really liked it.

On Friday, we began the class by going over the top 5 chapter titles that the students created. In order to encourage them to be more creative, the top 5 students were given some privileges, such as prizes or given the chance to pick something. For example, we would be doing a mock trial on Monday, so the students who created better and more creative titles got to pick their roles first. I addressed the students by names to get them tell me which roles they wanted to play. The quieter class started to speak up more in class, which was a nice improvement. It was nice to see both classes seemed to be excited for the mock trial. They asked a lot of questions about the mock trial. Originally I would show a clip of a mock trial to let students experience what it would look like. However, I forgot my adaptor and no projector was available. I needed to give them a simple definition to get them understand. I also went through the agenda to hope that they recognized what we would be doing. Hopefully on Monday, the mock trial will run smoothly. I provided the classes with some tips and script on how to conduct a mock trial. I gave them time to prepare for their speech and discussion, so everyone would be on the same page. I also got the louder class to quiet down by raising my hand. It will be nice if this trick can last. 😛

This week was quite chaotic.
There was a student telling me he would be gone for 4 weeks. I needed to print out all the worksheets and assignment guidelines for him to finish. Since he would not be participating in the trial on Monday ,I asked him to read through them during group discussion. Based on the questions he asked, I needed to modify some of the worksheets. I forgot to put down the instructions on some of them because they would be class work.
I also had a discussion with another ESL teacher to talk about a particular student’s learning progress. She provided me with some worksheets that she did with that student. The teacher also invited me to observe the class that many of my ESL students from the Humanities 8 class were present. It was neat to see them in a different class environment. They were a lot more active in the ESL class. I guess they were intimidated by the “regular” students. They probably need some encouragement and chances in class to show that they can do the same thing like the other kids in class. I provided some of the “modified” worksheets for a few ESL students because they were struggling with the journal entries. I am not sure if that is fair; however, the main purpose of the entries is to  assess if students understand each chapter. I only provide them with some guiding questions and ask them to elaborate and provide some details about their opinions. I think very soon I may have to talk to a few of the ESL students ho have not been able to hand in their assignments in a row. I will have to address them as soon as possible.