My first practicum evaluation

Today was, for me, the day that strikes fear into the hearts of student teachers everywhere: the Site Visit. My course director from York came to see me teach and to flip through my practicum binder. I knew going into this that my course director has been happy with all the work I've done in the program so far, and my host teachers have been pretty happy with all the work I've done at A.C.I. so far (they've also been working on the formal evaluation of me that they're supposed to submit by the end of the week and have shared their evaluative thoughts with me--they're all quite good), but when my York life is about to intersect my A.C.I. life things get a little intimidating. Due partly to some procrastination on planning for this intimidating lesson and partly to getting lots of other things done/organized, I stayed up until 1:30 a.m. this morning planning my lesson (which isn't actually too bad compared to some planning/marking nights). When I went to bed, I checked what time the alarm time was set for. Satisfied, I went to sleep.

I woke up just after 7 a.m. this morning. This is not the time I had intended to get up (apparently I checked what time the alarm was set for but didn't actually turn the alarm on). However, I was able to work with this time frame because I knew what I was going to wear today and had my planning pretty much done and the things I needed to take with me pretty much in one place; I just dressed, gathered my things, threw my hair into a banana clip, threw on some face powder to deal with the shiny greasiness, brushed my teeth to deal with the morning breath, and drove myself to school unwashed and unfed and planning to buy lunch from my home form at school (it's a "Christmas Cheer" fundraising week at A.C.I. to raise $ for Agincourt Community Services and my home form has decided to sell food--though our food buyers were both absent today so they ended up not selling today after all). Oh, I also did a quick e-mail check to make sure I wasn't missing any last-minute message from my course director telling me he'd decided not to visit after all...guess he really is coming.

At A.C.I., I did manage to get done pretty much everything I wanted to before class, including creating an overhead on the photocopier (though the first photocopier I tried to do this on broke down on me--@#%$!), setting up a spot for my course director to sit with my practicum binders and a copy of my lesson plan, preparing all the equipment and chemicals for a demo I did for the students, preparing some writing for a note the students would take from the blackboard, looking over some questions I wanted to assign them to work on in groups and making sure the answers given for those questions by the textbook (and the teacher's resource) were correct (though I didn't get through all of them). My course director took a bit of time to show up at the beginning of the period (my host teacher ended up escorting him to our classroom from the main office), so I and the students waited until he arrived. One student asked if I was nervous; I told her, "I'm just teaching," and wasn't really that nervous; I also asked if she was nervous!

Overall, the lesson went well, and the class behaved well for me (my course director even made a note of their good behaviour and attentiveness). When my course director called me aside to discuss the lesson while students worked on their group work, I mentioned being pretty happy with the lesson, but that there were a couple things that we've discussed at York as being very important to lessons that I didn't think I'd included and that I knew I had to work on. Well, it turns out I did actually include some of those elements (yay!) and that my course director knows those elements have to be worked in around the culture of the school and may or may not get into every lesson. I got a glowing written evaluation; a couple things to think about more were mentioned to me (and others to my host teacher separately) but overall my course director was quite pleased. He had come to observe my period 1 class (8:45 a.m. - 9:55 a.m.) and I had 2 more periods after lunch to teach the same lesson, so it was nice to know off the bat that I was on the right track...and having my evaluation in first period kept me from stressing about an upcoming evaluation any longer than first thing in the morning. Incidentally, the student who'd asked if I was nervous also asked how I did after my course director left (he had to leave earlier than the period had quite ended because he had 2 other people to see today, one for some type of "crisis"), so I told her I'd done well and that this was a good class...probably partly because in first period they were too tired to act up :)!

Anyway, I have to go as I am going to see my grade 11 and 12 students play in A.C.I.'s senior Christmas concert tonight, but I wanted to share part of what happened in my day today. Thanks for listening.