"Thank you Miss"
Today I had one of those satisfying days that every teacher longs for. Well, for the most part.
I have a lovely tutor group who are well behaved, turn up in the correct uniform, and, apart from a small issue with being physically attached to their mobiles, are a joy to be with. That being said, they don't ever really interact with me unless forced to (being a PGCE student they have their 'main' form tutor too, who they generally converse with leaving me feeling a bit like a lemon). Today was different on two counts: one, their normal main tutor was off ill, so they had me, and two, most of them were off to an English resit, leaving me without about 8 of their classmates to 'entertain'. Unfortunately for them, the prescribed pastoral programme for this week is revision, so I set them off on that.
A couple of minutes in I overhear a conversation between two girls who were saying to each other that they "don't really know how to revise anyway, when I read stuff I never remember it". Ah, I thought, hear is somewhere where I could interact with these girls in a friendly manner and give them a helping hand as to how to revise.
So being the hypocritical teacher who can't revise, I started listing the ways in which people I know revise eg. summarise each main point with a bullet point, record themselves talking about a subject and listen to it in the car or on their iPod or try and explain it all to someone else. Now at no point during this did I expect them to take my advise: whilst I am young enough to have obviously done this all recently, the immediate response from one girl didn't fill me with hope: "I've never thought of writing stuff down before" she stated "I don't like revision that takes effort". Never mind I thought, and wandered off to check on my other tutees.
A few minutes later I wandered back over and to my surprise, here was the girl who had been commenting about effort with a notebook out, summarising the biology work she had to revise. At this point I was chuffed: someone had taken my advice, but the best was yet to come.
The bell went to head to first period and the students packed up and started to leave, as I walked out the door, this girl came after me and, walking beside me (really not something a cool kid does), she turned to me and said "thank you Miss". Now to my non-teacher readers (if you exist) this may not sound like much, but I have never had a kid say thank you before: they may be grateful for what I do, but I never hear their feedback unless I do something they dislike. So this has made my week, nae, my month.
As if this wasn't enough, as I walked back to the office, one of my lovely year 7s stopped me in the corridor, explaining that they had lost their homework sheet and could they pick one up later. I was almost speechless! A student wanted to do homework for me, so much so that they'd inconvenience themselves to come and get the sheet that they had lost.
So today was very satisfying. Shame about office politics but that's for another blog post...
I have a lovely tutor group who are well behaved, turn up in the correct uniform, and, apart from a small issue with being physically attached to their mobiles, are a joy to be with. That being said, they don't ever really interact with me unless forced to (being a PGCE student they have their 'main' form tutor too, who they generally converse with leaving me feeling a bit like a lemon). Today was different on two counts: one, their normal main tutor was off ill, so they had me, and two, most of them were off to an English resit, leaving me without about 8 of their classmates to 'entertain'. Unfortunately for them, the prescribed pastoral programme for this week is revision, so I set them off on that.
A couple of minutes in I overhear a conversation between two girls who were saying to each other that they "don't really know how to revise anyway, when I read stuff I never remember it". Ah, I thought, hear is somewhere where I could interact with these girls in a friendly manner and give them a helping hand as to how to revise.
So being the hypocritical teacher who can't revise, I started listing the ways in which people I know revise eg. summarise each main point with a bullet point, record themselves talking about a subject and listen to it in the car or on their iPod or try and explain it all to someone else. Now at no point during this did I expect them to take my advise: whilst I am young enough to have obviously done this all recently, the immediate response from one girl didn't fill me with hope: "I've never thought of writing stuff down before" she stated "I don't like revision that takes effort". Never mind I thought, and wandered off to check on my other tutees.
A few minutes later I wandered back over and to my surprise, here was the girl who had been commenting about effort with a notebook out, summarising the biology work she had to revise. At this point I was chuffed: someone had taken my advice, but the best was yet to come.
The bell went to head to first period and the students packed up and started to leave, as I walked out the door, this girl came after me and, walking beside me (really not something a cool kid does), she turned to me and said "thank you Miss". Now to my non-teacher readers (if you exist) this may not sound like much, but I have never had a kid say thank you before: they may be grateful for what I do, but I never hear their feedback unless I do something they dislike. So this has made my week, nae, my month.
As if this wasn't enough, as I walked back to the office, one of my lovely year 7s stopped me in the corridor, explaining that they had lost their homework sheet and could they pick one up later. I was almost speechless! A student wanted to do homework for me, so much so that they'd inconvenience themselves to come and get the sheet that they had lost.
So today was very satisfying. Shame about office politics but that's for another blog post...
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