My two week practicum

As I said in class, I went to Terrace for my two week practicum. There I taught the grade 10 art class and sat in on a lot of other classes to get a good sense of the variety of teaching styles in the school. Overall I had a great experience with teaching. The students seemed to respond well and welcomed the change of having someone new in their class.

Before I started teaching and was just sitting in on the art classes, I could tell that some of the students had minimal respect for the art teacher I was working with. She is a nice person to work with but I found she bullied some of the students who weren’t participating as they could have. One of the girls she was always yelling at had a learning disorder which the teacher thought she was just “milking” to get away with being lazy. I always like to give students the benefit of the doubt so when I took over I made sure to go around to each student during the class as they were working on their assignments to let them know that I respected and valued their progress and involvement. It was really simple. All I did was talk to them like normal human beings and they responded positively and even produced more work for me than they did for their regular teacher. I made the girl with a learning disorder smile more than once which is something I didn’t see with the other teacher.

I mentioned this in class, but I will briefly state it again, that if you’re working in a small town it is much different than living in Victoria or Vancouver. Your privacy is somewhat restricted as rumours fly a lot faster so its important to keep a good public profile. Chances are you will run into a student, colleague, or even a parent (gasp!) if you go shopping or even to a pub and that might be hard to get used to for people who haven’t grown up in that scenario. For me I am used to it and I like running into students around town because then they can see that you have a real life too, and you are not “just” a teacher. However, we are always setting an example for the students, whether we think we are or not, so it’s best to always keep in mind things like dress, language, PDA’s etc. Small towns are great though,and it’s much easier to get on the sub list and/or find work!