August 23rd

Today I leave for my long weekend in Sydney! But not till after my classes...My morning was pretty average and boring.

My afternoon was a roller coaster. It was my first day teaching American Football and I wanted to assess my year 12 class with peer assessment. These rubrics measured the grip, throw and pass of a football. I got the students to have a catch with each other, no problem. As soon as we finished that task, I tried to teach them a route. I chose the curl and demonstrated it with a few different students. I explained why it was important to have a route as well. But this took forever. These students don't stop talking and I took Cameron's advice to just wait for them and let them decide when they were ready. Eventually they got the point that I was waiting and were able to learn the route and do a few runs using it. Once I brought them back in to explain the game of flag football, they wouldn't stop talking again. And Again I waited but I guess that method only works once. I told them that I will wait until they were ready to play have fun and play a game. A few of them even tried to get the others to stop talking, but I ended up waiting till the end of class which was about 25 minutes. I then explained to them that if this is how it is going to be when we are outside, we are never going to be able to play games. I told that its disrespectful and i'm sick of asking someone to stop talking every minute so if they wanted to waste their own time, they could. I was not happy at the end of the class and now I had to think of a new way to get them to stop talking because we will never get to play if I am waiting all the time. The head of P.E. was actually right there on the oval talking to a few teachers and I went up to them saying "I don't know what to do anymore." The head of P.E. asked if they were year 12, I said yes and he basically made a face and said that all year 12's are disrespectful now because they don't care anymore. I spoke to a few teachers and Cameron to get different ideas of what to do. It is going to come down to going straight to the classroom next time instead of the ovals or I will have to print out a lecture that the student can copy while sitting out. I have really hesitated to have them sit out because some of them want to and I am worried the entire class will end up sitting out. The 12th graders have pretty much lost any motivation to be in class and they have the QCS next week, which is the equivalent to the SAT but that is no excuse in my eyes.

Thankfully I always have a great class after the year 12's. I did the same activities to test out if my lesson was bad and maybe I need to adjust it. But as I expected, this lesson went great. I could have worked on my timing a little more because we didn't have much time to play, but they learned a ton and I think I need to take it slow with this class because they know nothing about American Football. I was very impressed with their throwing/catching though and no one threw it like a rugby. I also gave them minimal information about the game of flag football to see if they could figure it out. They did awesome and ran a few plays. Of course a lot of people had questions, which I was prepared to hear, but next class I will play mostly games and show them more about the tactics and rules. I told them not to worry and that next class they will fully understand the game.

I finally get to leave for Sydney! Hopefully next week is better with year 12's but I find myself saying that every week and it doesn't get better. Ill just stay positive though and set very strict expectations and rules for the next two weeks.