Life As A Teacher

I loved every minute of it! Having full control of a class, teaching various groups of learners, and doing various activities after school and during school time was amazing! I can see myself getting used to this. What I enjoyed the most about this experience was that it gave me an opportunity to see what it would be like for me one day when I have my own class and I have a job as a teacher. Yes, it is a lot of work, and you don’t really have time for much, like I found myself taking bathroom breaks like it was never going to come again until I get home and using different classroom management tools to keep the different classes I had well managed and engaged in the content. Not one method worked for every class. I used the bubble balls online noise control platform to help with classroom management, because I found that the learners were extra loud and would go off topic when having class discussions and get noisy as compared to when their teacher would teach them. This worked for the first day I used it, the second day I tried to use it again and it didn’t work because the learners said that it’s used for ‘kids’ and they were not kids. It worked for the lower grades I had to teach during my life of a teacher, but not for the Grade 7 classes I taught, so I stuck to what I knew and that was a noise monitor on the board. I wrote the numbers 1-4 on the board, and I would circle each number the louder the class got, and when they reached 4, I took away a privilege or a game that we were going to play as punishment for the day. That seemed to do the trick, and kept the learners engaged, we were still able to have class discussions, but learners didn’t talk or make a noise when they were busy with group work and doing individual tasks. This helped a lot. Although, through my days it did feel weird not having the mentor teacher chirp in now and again to help throughout the lesson, she let me do what I needed to do while she prepared additional work for me to do while the learners were busy or during the admin periods in that specific day.