Some solo flying

Monday Surestart Literacy - the snow was on the retreat and we had a more or less full complement of students plus one new female student. Laura had asked me to teach the main body of the plenary session (while she inducted the new student and did her diagnostic assessment) and provide the resources. I found a number of crossword games - with ible/able ent/ant ending-words and Laura had given me a "Dictionary Challenge" game to copy and use as the main part of the session.
Both exercises went well, with Mark taking part with his crossword clues scaffolded ....

Oh dear -  I started that post about a month ago and never finished it. Nor have I managed to write or reflect on anything between then and now - except mentally, of course.

In fact, now I remember it, that lesson went rather well, with the crosswords holding attention and the Dictionary Challenge team game getting quite raucous as the two sides became competitive and I was trying to keep the scores reasonably even across the slightly mis-matched ability teams. It was a good way for me to work up a better relationship with this slightly reserved group, and Laura seemed happy enough with the way it had gone. I re-ran this lesson with the Wednesday Get On Literacy Class, which was also fine but completely different in tone and response. Perhaps because the class is not such a coherent group as the Surestarts, and because the ability range is more diverse, it wasn't such a sparky activity - but it still produced good learning outcomes and the class enjoyed the activity.

I didn't see it coming when the next week's Surestart Literacy lesson turned into a low point in my teaching placement. I'd prepared a pretty full lesson on word and sentence level activities, including more crosswords, homophone, homonym and synonym stuff which segued into word types. I'd followed a lesson plan and set of resources that Laura had sugegsted and I thought for at least the first hour that it was going well, differentiation was working, structure was tight. Laura was leaving me to it while working through the results of a test or diagnostic with an individual student.
I guess I was pushing them quite hard on word types - nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs etc - but most were there, with the exception of a new student who had started the previous week and although fine with most aspects of the work, said she just didn't get nouns and verbs, had never understood them...  And I could see Laura watching me handle this with what looked to me like an expression of great anxiety on her face. Before the end of the lesson, she came back in, took over, told the new student she'd bring her a special worksheet next week... and made me feel somewhat foolish and incompetent, unintentionally, I'm sure.
Her feedback after they'd left was a little terse (well, it must be incredibly frustrating as a mentor to see your class taken over by amateur incompetence and your students not getting the high level of teaching you yourself would have delivered) and about overloading students with too much information, too many intensive activities and not leaving enough processing time and "fun" activities. I felt it must have been a complete disaster, but Laura did say that the students had probably not felt there was a problem at all.
Still, when she went on to suggest subject matter, resources and activities for next week's lesson - including finding a range of newspaper and magazine ads, and laminating them... I fell apart. Ridiculous, but I've never laminated anything in my life, I didn't know where or how to do it -- suddenly it felt as if teaching was simply beyond me and I'd never make the grade. Poor Laura, she was already running late for her next class, but she sat down to try and put the pieces of me back together. It didn't entirely help when she said that her main worry was my commitment -- I'm committed alright, just more pressed for time than most other full time DTLLS students, with two small children and a household to run alongside a post-graduate diploma course and 150 hours of teaching practice!
It was probably the nearest I've got to pulling out of the whole course - which in fact is what Sarah has done, by the way. She finally complained to the Vice Principal about the fiasco of her placement and mentor and got some action, but then fell out with the mentor, who thought that she should be ready to take on teaching some small parts of the class after a couple of weeks observing. Well, that's was about the timescale within which everyone else started bits of teaching, but Sarah apparently refused and has now left for good. Shame, she was going to be a good teacher, and hopefully still will be.
Anyway, that was a diversion. By the next day I had pulled myself together and after the Tuesday numeracy lesson, went to Laura's office to learn how to laminate. A revelation: so simple - I loved it! I might even buy my own small laminator, apparently you can get them for about £25! And the ads I'd found look splendidly professional as resources for next week. If I can learn to laminate, I'm sure I'll get the hang of this teaching thing before too long.