Thursday Reflection

today began my official foray into teaching. i'm taking on the grade 10 accounting class for 3-4 periods. the content is chapters 1-6 of the century 21 accounting text book, so i taught a reinforcement activity summarizing all the student learning so far. although accounting has been out of my comfort zone, i realized the reason for that is that i haven't felt very comfortable with the material. knowing i was going to be instructing on it, i had to learn it well! and once i did that i discovered something: i REALLY like accounting! fancy that, eh?? so i began the lesson excited about the material and also about finally getting to teach.

i introduced myself, wrote the tasks on the board that we'd be doing and asked the students a current event question. we also had a competition, boys verses girls, to quiz them on the content they'd learned so far. looking back, i think the game could have been structured a bit better. maybe have less teams (we only had two - boys vs girls, which the students loved) and then more could participate.

rhonda had warned me, and we had seen for ourselves, that this is a very chatty group. i was surprised, as i think rhonda was too, how well the class listened for me! it was awesome! the transition from the game to the activity went well. i told them basically just that - "okay, now we're going to transition into an activity where you can use what you already know". we read through the question, me reading aloud, and then i modelled the first question for them. i then gave them time to do the question on their own. we continued like that until we'd made it to about the 3rd instruction. i went around and answered questions and helped students. some had to be prompted to get back on task but others were working away.

this class has a handful of students that are working ahead. rhonda worked with these students, so in this sense i had less on my plate to think about; otherwise i'd have to be differentiating for those students.

today was a great experience! i am excited about accounting - i really want to teach it in the future - and i truly enjoyed interacting with the students. i felt relaxed and while i was mindful of what i was doing so that i'd do what i was supposed to do, i still felt freedom to be myself.