August 16th

During first session today Cameron and I went down to Donna, the deputy principal, to fill out the midterm evaluation. Everything went really well and I pretty much knew what my grades would be because we talk everyday about the lessons and how I am doing. It was not a surprise in any sort of way, which is good.

Session three I taught ultimate Frisbee to year 12. This lesson went to shambles honestly. Ive been having a pretty hard time managing and controlling this class because I try to treat them their age, but they don’t act it. They are always using the equipment and running off doing something else. When I ask them to come sit in front of me, it takes them a solid 5 minutes. There are also a few students who are extremely negative the second they get into class. They don’t even know what they are doing yet and they’ll complain about being at school or outside. Except when we go inside, they complain also. Most of them don’t want to learn and just want to play but that isn’t how a class is and I also have to think about the multiple Italians and Germans in the class who have never played games like speedball or Ultimate Frisbee. They do play the game, and really well also. But everything before the game is really difficult with the lack of willing to pay attention and learn. Cameron gave me a lot of good tips after this lesson that I followed for my next session.

Last session of the day I have my year 9 sex ed class on ovals playing ultimate Frisbee as well. Now this lesson went awesome, not only because I followed up on what Cameron told me but also because these students are much more willing to learn. I can and will brag about my management skills with year 9 because they are flat out fantastic. Maybe it is because I am much older than them compared to year 12, or maybe it’s the students but everything just goes 100 times better with this class. They sat and stopped talking when I asked them to or when I waited, didn’t touch the equipment unless they are told to and listened to my whistle. Clearly my confidence in teaching this class is higher. I taught them the 2 most popular Frisbee throws with cues, practiced and then put it together in a 10-pass game. They thought it was going to be easy, but they proved themselves wrong. I also let this go on a little longer than I was going to allow because the students were having fun, being competitive and putting a lot of effort into it. It was really nice to see this, made me smile a bit. The half field game went great also and they wanted to keep playing.

After that lesson, I think Cameron was a little shocked by how much better it was so we analyzed and dissected both lessons to figure out why the first one went worse. What it came down to was that I feel more of an authority figure to the 9^th graders than the 12^th graders because I am closer to age to them. I also realized that 12^th graders don’t always act their age and I will probably have to run my lessons with them like I do with the year 9 and be very exact with my instructions. My other problem with the year 12 class is that the Italians like to talk and try to fool me that they can’t understand me, but they speak pretty good English. Cameron gave me more ideas of what I can do with the year 12 class and hopefully they will work better tomorrow. The one great thing about all this is that I don’t let it get me down, I don’t get upset and will never take it personally. Not everything goes right all the time even if you work for 30 years. I will just focus on getting my confidence higher in that class for the next 3 weeks.