This was my very first teaching experience. I taught Workplace Math 10 in P2 for 3 weeks just before spring break of 2023. I am not going to lie, it was terrifying at first. I remember having a decently cocky attitude on my first day… I was soon to be humbled. While the first lesson went rather smoothly, the second quickly turned into… a learning opportunity. The students were supposed to do an activity using measuring tapes using inches. The assumption I had made was that surely all of them would be able to use such a tool… I was very wrong. My most vocal and fast working student called me over 2 seconds in with the question: “What do the small lines between the numbers in this tape mean?”
Panicked, I spent the latter half of the lesson having to improvise an entire lesson on fractions; the success rate was negligible. To make things worse, this would turn out to be the day where attendance was highest at about 80% of the class list. (33% was the average)
I had learned an important lesson about Standard 3: Check your student’s knowledge before a lesson. My coaching teacher had even warned me about the possibility, but I had thought it not necessary to deal with anything other than full inches as part of the activity. Now I was wiser.
That initial nosedive was followed with two weeks of steady improvement. My coaching teacher was an absolute rockstar during this time. She gave me manageable tips for improvement daily and complemented me on things I did well. Soon I was teaching with confidence and purpose.
I tried place-based measuring activities and design projects and quickly found that students in Workplace Math 10 should best be taught using hands-on, and real-life scenarios. (Veteran teachers I have had conversations with share my opinion that shop and Workplace Math should be interwoven.)
Overall, I credit this practicum with showing me my first sets of strengths and weaknesses. While I had great connections with students and could sniff out learning opportunities out of student questions easily, I learned that I had to settle on my classroom management style: Should I be a hardass phone police kind of teacher or should I let students choose to not learn in my class. Whatever I decide on, it should be true to me and purposeful. And I anticipate that I will have to explain why.
Below are some blueprint design projects that my students created.
