Introduction
The last week before the Christmas holidays… not gonna lie I’m writing this now the other side of Christmas, (had a hectic couple of weeks as everyone does!), so don’t expect as much detail as usual if you’re one of my 3 regular readers! Anyway, if you are reading this, I hope you had as good a Christmas as I did! J
P2 Second Visit
I spent Monday in P2 again, and I have now got my timetable finalised – I will be teaching 2 hours of year 12 English Lit and 2 hours of year 12 English Lang a fortnight. I am unbelievably excited (and completely nervous) to be teaching A-level. In literature, I will be looking at Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, as well as a selection of Coleridge poetry. I haven’t read either of these before, so I will use a bit of my holiday time to make sure I know a bit about each of the texts before I come across them in the classroom. In language, I will be teaching stand-alone language issues, such as the need for a gender-neutral pronoun but will discuss details with their teacher closer to the time.
As this is a Church of England school, each of the houses were attending a church service in tutor time this week. I was lucky enough to be part of this – and my AT gave me the handy tip of standing at the back by the radiator to stay warm!
After discussing with the teachers, I have decided to team teach the first week back, probably taking over the year 9s sooner rather than later which is exciting. I finally got given a work laptop, which will allow me to access everything from home… getting a head start on the planning
University
Throughout this week, we have touched on a few more things to bear in mind for our next placement.
One of the most useful (and fun!), was having a look at some of the resources our colleagues have created and sharing things that may be useful for us next term. I have seen some really fantastic activities that I shall be adapting and using in my teaching next term! Plus, it was really interesting to hear what went well for others, as well as what didn’t work so well.
The last thing I will mention in this post is the poetry by heart. Those of you on the course will know I did not share my pitiful attempt of learning a poem. I had chosen Two Pages, by Choman Hardi (link here). It is such a beautiful poem, and I found the more I tried to memorise it, the more I connected with the poem itself, unravelling layers of meaning and making sense of it. However, I did not dedicate sufficient time to learn this properly, thus I knew I could not do this poem justice so opted out. I can see the benefits of learning a poem by heart, but I feel like I would not make my students do this in front of the whole class unless they wanted to… no matter how safe a space may feel to one person, to another it could be anything but that!
J
Currently Reading:
- I will update this in my next post
Much Ado About Teaching 