On Teaching I

Well it's that time, I've graded all the tests, made grade sheets.  It's time to ask, am I any good at this teaching thing?  Well my English teacher once said that "teaching is defined by the audience"(Greg Bachar).  It is, for all of my classes I needed to teach different things at different speeds.  While grading I looked at trends, to see what people got wrong.  What I noticed was application, and short questions and answers.

What I mean by application is being able to use what we learn in writing.  They know plurals very well but in writing sentences they will not use the plurals of those same words!  Why?  That is because when we do our daily writing practice I don't want to take the 10+ minutes to check each individual's writing.  I want them to do the simple act of writing.  To remedy this, I will put more emphasis on writing activities (it is a writing class after all).

 The other problem that I noticed was asking and answering questions.  Example: Am I a teacher?  Yes you are.  Frankly why so many kids got this part wrong is enigmatic.  I drilled it into their heads for at least 2 weeks.  Yet in almost all of my classes, over half of them got it wrong.  The questions on the test related to characters in their textbook.  Here is a very common answer, Is Brian tall?  Yes it is.  Firstly, Brian is a boy, secondly he is short.  They should be using the words he or she, not it!  Between the two rooms that I teach in, 108 did a lot better than 109.  108 has my favorite students and they're very bright for the most part.  109 has delightful students who sadly aren't too bright.  The 109 morning class did rather poorly.

I will now answer the question that I set out to answer in this post.  It is not my final answer and chances are it will change a lot over time.  My honest answer is that for my first experience(s) teaching on my own...
I'm okay, I have a lot to learn, my current occupation isn't exactly easy.  I'm not doing a bad job but I think that I can do better (particularly with my grade 2 kids).  There is no self loathing or doubt here.  I have provided genuine and honest reflection above.  I know what to improve on and thank goodness meh test scores won't endanger my job.  This answer will change over time, I will do another piece like this at the end of the term.
Till next time.