hello rover

Well, 5 weeks gone, 6 weeks to go. This was my first full week of taking classes on my own. It was successful. It was also difficult at times, lots of fun other times, and I learnt a lot more yet again. And I even took the 9's as well for another 2 experiments. The real key to successful teaching is still hiding from me somewhere where i have not looked yet. But i think i'm getting warmer. I've put students on detention, i've nearly called some parents (i will be next week) and i've got kids to write contracts to explain what steps they will take to modify their behaviour in classes. I've confiscated mobile phones in class, mp3 players and all manner of projectiles. And believe it or not, i even had one extremely good class with the 9's today. we did an experiment on lenses and formed images of candles, and talked about how to correct short and long sightedness with glasses and how the hubble space telescope was even short-sighted. And how they have announced the discovery of 2 new moons of Pluto and got photos of it and all sorts of great science stuff. It was the best science lesson ever (3 of the most disruptive students were absent) and i really had lots of fun. That's what teaching is all about really, helping explain stuff to kids who have lots of great questions about stuff. And you know what the saddest thing is, next week when all the disruptive kids are back again, it will be back to the old, 90% behaviour talk, 10% learning talk. i think class sizes need to be made smaller even than 25, about 10-15 would be great, that way kids would actually learn stuff and no one would fall through the gaps and develop behaviour problems to hide their learning difficulties. i have no idea how anyone learnt stuff in the old days with classes of 40 or even 50 students. even 30 is way too many.
anyway, life goes on and students grow up whether they learn maths or not.