Trial Run: 2nd Meeting

I think the problems regarding my peer teaching back in the microteaching class were two things:
1. The noise in the room, and
2. The fact that I’m faking my teaching.

The first problem’s really obvious: the noise is really disturbing. I mean really, with the soundproofed walls, and with the fact that everyone in the room’s talking at the same time during the 15 minutes allocated time… hmm. It’s like having everybody talking in my ears at the same time and it’s disconcerting. Really. Have the soundproofing backfired? Perhaps. And I’ve noticed one thing while I’m there: you can’t even whisper without it being heard by everybody else in the room. This may be why everyone’s really trying to keep things quiet in class. You really can’t help but be heard, even when you’re not trying to be noisy or anything. And when everybody “teaches” at the same time like that..

WHOO. The noise, brother.

…which isn’t something that can’t be solved with the right amount of concentration, so bleh. Just keep your head straight and your mind organized and after some time, you’ll manage to get over the noise. So really, it really isn’t a problem.

My main problem really is the fact that I’m faking the 15 minutes session. I mean really, you’re teaching, but you’re not really trying to teach. The main purpose of the whole exercise is not that you help your friend understand or learn something - heck, he might know the things that you’re going to “teach” him more than you do - but that you’d know how to ACT the way a teacher would that would, hopefully, stimulate a learning curiosity. (Which is a problem, since I usually operate best by utilizing my students’ curiosity.) When the curiosity’s not there, I’d usually check the students out: have they already mastered what I’m giving them, or do they feel like what I’m teaching them isn’t something they find important, and depending on their response, I may decide to modify my approach or skip the particular material altogether.

But when you’re bound to a particular material, you really don’t have that luxury of material-skipping. And since the whole session was never meant for my assigned peer to master the material I present him (he was really just there to gauge my performance) I really sort of feel like I’m losing the whole “teaching” sense of the whole thing. It really felt more like acting, with my material as my script.

Nevertheless, I don’t think I messed up too much back there. I’ve always been quite confident with my presentation skills and “performing” for my partner was really no problem. My only problem was that my brain kept telling me that that was not a real teaching session and that it’s really fake.

…Which was why I ended up trying to notice cues from my partner to see if I could actually get him to genuinely respond to my material. I actually ended up putting more effort trying to study my partner than trying to present my material. I noticed that he got really interested with the diverse application of conditional sentences and it really got me all focused on explaining the whole thing - which cost me the valuable time I needed to make a proper set closure. I covered the basics, yes. I gave the guy formative questions, I guided him through a concluding session, but that’s about it. I could have done better, like give him affective support or further learning suggestions or something, but I really was still distracted by the whole “play teacher” thing.

The only feedback that I got from my partner was that I’m using too much English. Well, I really couldn’t help it, could I? I guess I was so keen on making the session realistic that I actually saw him as a real student. It’s really not supposed to happen, I know. His role was really to play a class XII student - who he says would understand nothing that I was telling him throughout the 15 minutes. Yeah. I really need to do some brain conditioning before I go to my next micro-teaching class: my microteaching classmates are senior high students.

But really, I wish I could get into a real teaching session soon. I really need the authentic human interaction. Hmm… really can’t wait for my PPL2..

Anyways, the focus of this meeting is set-opening and set-closing. Messing up my set closure probably meant I didn’t reach the full standard of this particular class, huh? Oh well, there’s always next week.

Yogyakarta, 9 – 2 – 2009

(041214007)