Teaching definitely provides an exciting emotional rollercoaster, and there are many occasions where I really don't know whether to laugh or cry at my students' antics. Today, for example, I was helping the the Grade 4 students to put together posters on Hungarian cities. Daniel and I thought this was an awesome cross-curricular activity as the kids learnt about cities in their Nature Studies subject, had to write about them in English, and then got to design and construct beautiful posters to display their work in their Drawing subject with me.
Anyway, things were going pretty well. The posters were well underway and the kids seemed to be grasping some of the little tips and tricks that I'd taught them to make their posters look pretty (like using a ruler instead of just hacking away with scissors, and working from the inside out to create a neat, well-spaced heading). Awesome.
And then it happened. One of the boys came up to show me his completed poster. He was so proud and I felt like a teaching god for inspiring such incredible work. Then I noticed that he'd glued some of the writing on upside down! My ego deflated in about 2 seconds flat. It was so devastating to consider that either, a) he had so little understanding of the English sentences that he'd written, that he couldn't even recognise that they were upside down, or b) that all my reminders about doing things carefully and checking the layout before applying glue had fallen on deaf ears. Aargh! So frustrating!
Fortunately, I got over it pretty quickly and we managed to fix the problem without too much obvious damage to the lovely poster. Hooray!
- Amanda
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