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kyrasantae
It's still my observation week, but my mentor teacher asked me to help teach one of his classes today. He had given me a copy of the slides and the textbook to study beforehand, so I knew it was coming, though he's the kind of guy who wings his lessons so I had really no idea how he was going to teach it (the kids had started on these slides yesterday but I was out visiting other classes so I didn't see that either).
Turns out that it was a guided textbook reading (of which the slides were a summary), so after my mentor teacher went through the first slide, he passed the book to me and I had to do the rest, though he stood at the back and assisted me with picking people to answer questions and fill in information I missed. I felt comfortable in front of the class but naturally a little bit unprepared. After doing two slides I was somewhat nervously looking at him, as though saying "so...when do I pass the book back to you?" but he'd say "let's move on to the next slide" so I had to press on.
It's a relatively well-behaved group of students and my mentor had asked them to kindly be nice to me, so nobody gave me a hard time. In a few weeks I'll probably be teaching these kids completely on my own, so... yeah I'm nervous about that too, but at least I'll have written preparation for that.
And now a digression:
The lesson was on human uses for plants, and there was a little trivia sidebar in the textbook mentioning the discovery of a particular extract of birch bark originating in Finland, and popularized in Korea and Japan. So I thought that if there was going to be time in the lesson I was going to show-and-tell a package of Finnish gum and the below picture of birch forest. Anyway, there wasn't time, but whatever.
House and shed by Lake Tuomio (Tuomiojärvi), near Jyväskylä, Finland
Here is the same spot in Google Maps now. The houses down the road weren't there yet back then (2008), but they had just finished paving the road, as seen below. (The turn-off to the right at the crosswalk just before the new houses goes toward the lake and backtracks slightly to a cottage and sauna facility on the lakeshore, which is where we were going when I snapped the pics in this post.)
Yes, I have an obsession with this level of minute, pointless detail. Unfortunately it always brings back a kind of "post-partum" melancholy.
='(
Turns out that it was a guided textbook reading (of which the slides were a summary), so after my mentor teacher went through the first slide, he passed the book to me and I had to do the rest, though he stood at the back and assisted me with picking people to answer questions and fill in information I missed. I felt comfortable in front of the class but naturally a little bit unprepared. After doing two slides I was somewhat nervously looking at him, as though saying "so...when do I pass the book back to you?" but he'd say "let's move on to the next slide" so I had to press on.
It's a relatively well-behaved group of students and my mentor had asked them to kindly be nice to me, so nobody gave me a hard time. In a few weeks I'll probably be teaching these kids completely on my own, so... yeah I'm nervous about that too, but at least I'll have written preparation for that.
And now a digression:
The lesson was on human uses for plants, and there was a little trivia sidebar in the textbook mentioning the discovery of a particular extract of birch bark originating in Finland, and popularized in Korea and Japan. So I thought that if there was going to be time in the lesson I was going to show-and-tell a package of Finnish gum and the below picture of birch forest. Anyway, there wasn't time, but whatever.
House and shed by Lake Tuomio (Tuomiojärvi), near Jyväskylä, Finland
Here is the same spot in Google Maps now. The houses down the road weren't there yet back then (2008), but they had just finished paving the road, as seen below. (The turn-off to the right at the crosswalk just before the new houses goes toward the lake and backtracks slightly to a cottage and sauna facility on the lakeshore, which is where we were going when I snapped the pics in this post.)
Yes, I have an obsession with this level of minute, pointless detail. Unfortunately it always brings back a kind of "post-partum" melancholy.
='(
