Short Practicum Stories

STORY #1 - "Quiz Day"

One of my sponsor teachers, who teaches Physics 12 and Mathematics 9-12, told me a story of a time when his whole class was acting up. After multiple attempts to settle the children down, he informed them that he was officially declaring a "Quiz Day".

He handed out the first quiz, and instructed the children to stay seated and raise their hands when they had completed the quiz, and he would come to their desk to mark and record the quiz. When the first student finished his quiz, my sponsor teacher marked the quiz and recorded the mark, then handed the student his second quiz. When the first student finished the second quiz raised their hand, my sponsor teacher marked the quiz and recorded the mark again, then handed that student their third quiz.

By this time, students were asking my sponsor teacher what would happen if they didn't finish all three quizzes, to which he responded that he would give that student a "zero" mark for any quizzes that they didn't completely finish.

Word of my sponsor teacher's "Quiz Day" have become an urban legend in his school, and he has never had a class act up in the last few years.

STORY #2 - Volunteering in the Resource Room

I was volunteering in the Resource Room during my short practicum, and there was a girl that was struggling with solving single-variable algebra problems. I helped her understand the concept by teaching her using similar examples to the ones that she was assigned, and she seemed to clearly grasp the subject material. When I returned to help her a few minutes later, she was struggling with the homework assignment and getting very frustrated. When I checked her work, she had been incorrectly copying the problems from the textbook to her paper, inadvertently mixing up two questions and making her assignment questions multi-variable.

I worked with her to double-checking her work and correcting the copying errors, then reported to the full-time teacher in the Resource Room that the student's main struggle was incorrectly copying the homework questions into her book, and suggested that if the homework were assigned as a handout with room to solve the questions below each problem, she would not be having this problem. The Resource Room teacher said that he would mention this possibility to the mathematics teacher, and they would discuss it next week (after I finished my short practicum).