Accounting 10 Final Day

Monday Reflection

Today I finished in Accounting 10. The students continued to work on their Reinforcement Activity and I walked around the classroom helping students who needed it. I noticed a few things about today. For one, my name was shortened from Ms. Heywood to just "Heywood". I take this as a sign of respect from the kids as I'm now in the ranking with "Haus", among others. I think I feel okay with this. I know this is a generational thing; my grandma, also a teacher, would have been appalled. If I, even in jest, call my dad by his first name, I get the eyebrow raise. But this generation wants to be respected and is less formal in its interactions with adults. I guess I feel like I was accepted, in just a few short days, but the students.

The other thing that was fun was that at the end of the class I showed them a few slides with pictures of my time overseas and tried to get them to guess the place the picture was taken. I think the kids liked that. I also thanked them for the fun 3 days getting to teach them. To that there were "awww"s and "you're leaving?". They were sad! It warmed my heart! So I reassured them I'd be here for the next week and a half.

Another observation I have from teaching is the pace. I am so surprised at how SLOW it is. In university it always seemed that the pace of teaching is so quick, so intense and it's so hard to keep up with what's happening, but I have observed something different. I think that might be because the students are given time to work on their assignments in class. While I knew this in my head, I'd forgotten about it since I've been in university, as my formal education, for 7 years. We do all our work independently on our own at home. But students in high school need to be allowed the time to work on assignments in class. I know there will be days when I have to plan and teach a lot; but there will be other days when students just need time to work and to catch up on things. I think this is a good thing for a teacher, too, because it allows him or her to have a bit of a "break" from the intensity of teaching as well. During those work periods there is still important relationship building, management and discipline things that happen.