Monday, April 4, 2011

Partner Teaching in Edwards

Teaching has always brought the best out of me and observing and teaching in Edwards has generated mixed feelings of happiness and sadness in me.
The teaching periods for the teacher in Edwards have their advantages and disadvantages.
The good thing is the teacher has her classroom, she is comfortably settled with her identity all around. It helps her to be in control of the group. Hay, you get into the class and you know you have to conform to her rules or you get into trouble. That helps with discipline.
The uncomfortable part for me is the fact that you settle in one class for hours,teaching the same content over and over to the same group who always come in the same order everyday. The boredom makes me tired.
The tracking system also sadens me. I see so many with so much potentials losing confidence in themselves. some of them are not pushed hard enough- and at that age I dare say they need to be pushed to save themselves.
The teacher is helpless when it come to pushing them, because the children have their rights not to learn if they think so. This in a nut shell is the teacher's frustration- which makes me more than sad.
Apart from teaching them about my country and county's schooling system I have taught them a real content lesson. On the school term's content is poetry and my partener asked me to take if I could- of course I did.
I started the lesson which was very interactive and got the students themselves to come out with wonderful ideas of the poem. The next day we continued with the language and imagery used to enhance the poem, we reviewed the whole poem and on the third day my partner and I had a test which I marked and gave to her.  
The response of the groups, both to my class discussions and discoveries on the one hand and to the test on the other hand draws attention to the fact that they are all capable of learning academic content.
I am looking forward to another lesson in the content syllabus on folktales.

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