Today was my first day as a teacher in BC. My practicum doesn’t actually start until February, but we had a week of observation/introduction at our schools. We weren’t required to teach, but my sponsor teacher is really cool, so he let me take over 2 of his English 12 classes. Well, I didn’t totally take them over, but I taught for 50 minutes in each of those 1:20 minute blocks. It went really well! I was a little bit nervous at first, but I knew it would be fine since I had planned out the lesson well. The students laughed at my jokes, and my sponsor teacher said that students enjoy that sort of “dry, self-deprecating” humour. He also said I had a good presence in the classroom, which I took to mean that I didn’t mumble at all. All in all it was a lot of fun. I introduced a short story they’ll be working with, “An Occurrence at Owl’s Creek Bridge.” That entailed giving some background about the American Civil War, the author’s (Ambrose Bierce) life, and some activities relating to the story’s main theme, reality vs. illusion. Naturally, I took the chance to draw a big chalk picture of the General Lee with its Confederate flag roof. It was fun. I was happy to get my feet wet and to get ahead of those in my cohort who haven’t started teaching yet.

My sponsor teacher is really awesome. We are well suited because he’s really into thing like The Simpsons, Arrested Development, The Office, and Judd Apatow movies. He’s really popular and successful with the students, but some of the staff are rubbed the wrong way by him because he has some unconventional techniques. He has a really great rapport with the students, though. That’s important. One thing he does is called “Feel Good Fridays.” This involves the students being randomly assigned another student. They then have to write something nice about that student in a few sentences. Some of them are kind of silly, like: “If I was Japan, and you were America, I’d definitely bomb your Pearl Harbor.” And some are kind of bland, but I’m sure some have been good, anonymous confidence builders for some kids. It’s a good ice breaker and a good tool for class unification. OK, well, that was a summery little summary. Now I’ll just find a picture and put it up so that blogger can delete it for no reason in 2 days.