Throughout Internship, I noticed that my whole feeling around the 'teaching thing' was that I was happy about it and I was happy to do it, but that I wasn't excited about it all the time. I was talking about it with Nikolova when she came for my POL, and through that conversation I decided that while I enjoyed teaching and I'm not ruling it out forever, I want to explore other options for now. Teaching is always something I can come back to and be happy with, but I want to explore and see what's out there for now. I decided this because kids are hard, dude. They're so energetic and excited about everything and I'm a really laid-back, shy person. It felt like I was putting up a front when I was in front of the class. But I'm not ruling it out forever, just for now.
3 Comments
My internship project, as explained previously, was doing mini-teaching projects. I ended up doing three or four mini lessons (I have 3 photos in my slideshow.) I ended up reading several other books to the kids and I really ended up enjoying it. I think this project was important as it showcases different kinds of teaching to the kids and it was a new experience for me and that was important. I think as people and as students we stay in our comfort zones because it makes us happy, and let's be honest, it's easy. But it's not helpful or remotely interesting to stay there all the time. For me, it was a welcome challenge and an adventure to go on, trying to find my way out of the comfort zone. And that's why this project was important to me. I found that this project was fairly simple and so the journey of going through it and making it happen was simple as well, but that's what I needed. It wouldn't have been right to jump in and do something crazy complicated for me and the kids certainly wouldn't have benefitted from it at all. They need simple. After all, they're five. Complicated things just wouldn't work for them. Basically, I would talk to my mentor, Mrs. Wisma, and we would decide what book to read next. Then we would start to talk about a product, and then a few days later we would make it happen. It was great. I would also make an example product for them to look at! Sometimes we'd have some challenges where we would run out of time, but then we'd just switch up materials or we'd cut something out. I really enjoyed it. Below you can see all of my examples of projects the kids did. Underneath this is the PDF of my POL script. I hand-wrote it after class, said it through once and timed myself. I ended up hitting the pacing on the mark though I only kept true to the spirit of the script and I didn't read off of it. I had the list of questions Nikolova emailed us and I ended up reading off the question and responding to it. My mentor seemed to enjoy that as she responded as well after I had. It felt more like an evaluation than a POL.. I'd say it was successful. I'm sorry if you can't read it, my handwriting tends to be a bit illegible.
When I started internship, I had problems with viewing it as kind of one big thing: I couldn't see all the tiny, individual days that made it up. It was like some grand concept that I couldn't quite process in the right ways. Now that I have only four more days left, (My internship ends early as school gets out on June 5th) I look back and I can remember what happened every day, and I can imagine the next four days. So let's get into the gritty details.
For obvious reasons, I will not take photos of the kids I'm working with. All photos will be of projects, reflections, and various locations/objects I remember from when I went to school there.
|