…Farewell, Microteaching!

Since my last post, I’ve been through two personal microteaching practices, at least fifteen teaching sessions done by other microteaching students, one classroom teaching (where I get to teach a junior class), and an observation trip to John De Britto High School (where I will be teaching from the middle of July for five months).

Yes, a lot has happened, and the only reason nobody’s reading about them here in my blog’s because I’d been having lots of other stuff going on in my life (my engagement to my girlfriend, for one…^^).

I’d thought about writing down every single teaching event that had happened, but then I decided that since all those events happened quite a while ago, I wouldn’t be able to write down what I felt / learnt back then accurately. I mean, I take notes, but my notes only go so far.

So what I’ll do is I’ll type in summaries of what I could still remember about some of the key events that really mattered. It won’t be detailed, but it’d be meaningful.

Oh, anyway, this won’t be my last entry in this blog. Sure, my microteaching class is coming to an end, but, well, I sort of think that my teaching activities will carry on as long as I’m alive. So every time I go through something mortifyingly interesting or significant, I’ll be dropping a page or two here at StonedTypist’s.


Oh well, let’s begin with the first thing to write down: My own Micro Teaching Session(s)!

The first practice teaching session’s very easy to describe: It’s a DISASTER!
I was nervous, I was excited, I was focused and distracted, I was a mess. Seriously. I actually spent 15 minute showing the class stereotypical images of race. I mean, yeah, it’s actually a really interesting slideshow, but who in their right mind would throw away 50% of their teaching time by showing pictures?? Bad time management.

Oh, and talking about time management, I actually lost track of the time. I think it was because the classes that I taught at usually have a clock on their wall. What’s available in our microteaching class was a countdown time, and that timer doesn’t even start counting until you only have 5 minutes left.

To make things worse, I’d actually, in all my excitement of having my first microteaching session, prepared a material that could only be finished in one and a half hours – that’s THREE TIMES the amount of time available!

The second practice session was really not much better, since I WASN’T PREPARED!
Call me stupid, but I actually forgot that it was my turn to be teaching the class. I didn’t have any handouts or even a teaching plan. I only knew that I was going to be teaching about ‘expressing feelings’ but I didn’t know where to start and I haven’t actually thought about how to begin the lessons and bring them to a close.
Needless to say, it went on really badly. I wasn’t as nervous as I was the first time, I was much, MUCH relaxed after I’ve had my ‘Junior Class Teaching’, felt like I’d gotten back my Mojo and all that, but seriously, I couldn’t do anything right without a plan.

I originally wanted my class to be this really dynamic speaking class, but it ended up with me hogging the Talking Time and wasting more time writing exercises on the whiteboard as the students gawk.

Stupid, stupid, stupid!

Watching the videos for the two sessions was really excruciating. It’s actually kind of fun because you never really know how you look like when you are teaching, but you also feel the constant slap-in-the-forehead feeling when you notice the most OBVIOUS blunders and mistakes that you do when you’re teaching. In a way, seeing myself teach was really a humbling experience. It kept me thinking “If this is how I look like when I teach, man, I have lots to learn!” – which is always good. It will propel me in the right direction.

One thing went right, and that was my Junior Class Teaching, where I taught reading comprehension to 2008 students. I was confident, relaxed, detailed and engaging. The classroom was dynamic, and everybody (I think) had fun learning how to analyze paragraphs.

There was this one little problem, though. Ms. Veni had originally wanted me to finish this material she’d given me within the 45minutes that I was allowed to teach her reading class. The only problem was that the material was a tad too difficult for the students to comprehend / even enjoy reading it, when the goal of the reading class was to enable students to analyze and scrutinize the article in detail – and it’s really difficult to get the students excited over something they don’t really like. It actually needed a lot of effort trying the get their excitement up for the passage.

Needless to say, 45 minutes wasn’t enough.

Still, my little act has successfully created curiosity and, I think, a healthy amount of passion among the juniors to start analyzing in detail the text that they were given on their own accord. It made me feel good and really proud. I actually felt that I have, to a certain degree, succeeded becoming a true teacher.

After a series of events, I have also managed to attend my observation to John Debritto, the school I would be assigned to teach in for 5 months starting the middle of July. I was actually quite excited when I first learned that I was going to be assigned to John Debritto. I’d heard that the school taught some of the most intelligent minds in Jogjakarta, and I was curious to learn about those brilliant minds. I wasn’t too thrilled that it was an all-boy’s school (my friend Stellx actually told me that the boys usually smelled because they didn’t like to take their baths… gruesome) and that the students there were also the most mischievous. However, I thought that if I really wanted to expand my horizons, develop my teaching strategies, this place was the perfect place.

So I met up with one of the school’s English teacher at the school on the day of my observation and I was told that I would be observing in his class for the 45 minutes that I was going to be there that day – I actually wanted to observe more but I had a test coming up in an hour so I could only stay for 45 minutes. During the 45 minutes, I noticed a lot of thing, mainly things that went wrong. First of all, the class was noisy as hell. The students chattered non-stop as the teacher announced that he was going to be reading out the students’ test results – and didn’t stop chattering till the end of the reading. And all throughout the noise, the teacher was relaxed as can be. I thought to myself that perhaps these Debritto students have the gift of being able to focus in a chaotic classroom. I mean, after all, they’re THE Debritto students.

Surprisingly, about more than 60% of the students received scores below 50/100 – which meant that about 60% of them couldn’t master 50% of the lessons taught to them. And although it is a really shocking figure to me, it obviously isn’t to the teacher. He was as calm and relaxed and went on with the next activity.

I really couldn’t understand his behavior, to tell you the truth. It’s like he couldn’t care less whether or not his students are learning anything in his classroom. I mean, if it were me, I would’ve been beating myself up trying to figure out where my lessons went wrong. My guess is that it was because he didn’t care enough that the students received those awful scores. But then again, it could have just been because the students didn’t pay enough attention to the lessons. 45 minutes is really not enough for me to make any assumptions. The students get a remedial test, though. Hopefully they’d do better.

Time management was a really big issue, I think. The teacher spent about 20 minutes reading out test result, leaving only 25 minutes for a reading session, which really isn’t enough to go through a reading passage thoroughly, especially when the teacher was having the students read the passage out loud individually. True enough, the bell rang before we could go over 50% of the text, and it was time for me to go.
I had a lot of thought going around in my head when I was leaving the school. If English was taught that way in Debritto, one of the ‘star’ schools of Jogjakarta, how then is the language taught in other less- celebrated schools? I knew from my girlfriend and from other people that learning English meant memorizing grammar rules in Stella Duce, another famous school, and I knew that it was never going to work. But I never felt this concerned about the quality of English lessons in high schools until Debritto.

‘There is still much to do’, I muttered to myself on the way to my campus. And really, there is. If I wanted to be a part of the solution, that is. There’s much about my own teaching methods that I’d need to develop and polish. There‘s much about my teaching strategies that I’d have to improve. I just hope that when I start teaching in Debritto, I’ll be able to help the students achieve higher English capabilities. And vice versa, I hope the students will be able to teach me a thing or two about how to become a better teacher.

These are exciting days, me mateys.