Day 2 of ED90 Prac 2nd Year

From one institution to another, this is the second day of my prac at a local primary school. The school is comparatively small with a diversity of students and an ESL unit for recent arrivals mainly from Africa and the Middle East. "Recent arrivals" is probably the politically correct buzzword for refugees. The school fosters cultural diversity and tolerance which is evident in the behaviour of all the children. I found great joy in watching the little grade one girls from different cultural background holding hands and playing together at lunch time. It is a very supportive school environment and the atmosphere is relaxed. A far cry from my own school days where we had to line up for assembly in the hot morning sun; listening to a bad rendition of "god save the queen" by the school band of recorder players. In those days the emphasis were on discipline where being quiet and sitting up straight were promoted as being essential to becoming an acceptable citizen. It worked on me for awhile but I eventually woked up to it. To promote docility is to promote stupidity.

My first day of class was just to observe. The school applied the principal of learning through context in it's upper level class that is the students are mixed in a class of year 5, 6 and 7, probably because this is one of the smaller primary school in Brisbane. I found this interesting in that there were a lot of collaborative learning involved within the groups of students regardless of what grades they are in. The downside to this is that there are a lot of interruption as students move in and out of class to their own level of the subjects. The ESL kids do the same subjects with an ESL teacher. The role of the teacher here is more of a traffic controller than a policeman. The theme for the context of learning is the SOSE subject of "Medieaval Times." Almost all of the subjects they do revolve around this theme. That is: in English and Italian, they learnt words and readings of that era, in art they made or paint activities realating to that era, etc. I am a great proponent of this method of teaching started by M.A.K. Halliday. Although I don't know what relevance "Medieaval Europe" have on the kids, especially the ESL kids who cannot relate to the subject of "Medieavel Europe" at all. Historical themes are always controversial in that it is all subjective. Although one need to ask what do these children really require to know for anything to be relevant at this developmental stage and that can only be the skills to go through high school.

Today, my second day of prac, I took the SOSE class on "castle" that I had observed yesterday as the teacher was away. I thought it was easy and it went quite well and in order for the children to understand better I relate the information to the movie "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King." Time management is something that I have to work on a bit. Also to select kids to answer questions who don't put their hands up as the same kids tend to want to answer the questions all the time. This could make the kids in the background lose interest. An amount of control is needed. For me there is the dilemma of whether to discipline the misbehaving children or not, because in my view the misbahaving kids are the ones that are street-smart and have innitiative. Although that innitiative is misdirected, it is still innitiative. I guess I have to work out a balance.

I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed that this isn't a rough school. From my experience kids are much easier to deal with than corporate managers.