Monday, 1 November 2010

Cl. My team mate.

Cl is a perfectly hard working teacher and takes sincere pains to do well. She is a very good person too and personally I not only like her a lot but also feel extremely lucky to have her in my group because of her nice, gentle, extremely feminine type nature. But, when it comes to teaching, she has her limits which I attribute to her lack of experience, formal training and a bit of necessary common sense in this field.

She comes up with lessons which are either too long or too difficult for the kids to master and most of the times she cannot make out what would be fit or unfit according to the age of the children in our group like when we were having the topic 'Autumn', I conducted a project in which the children made autumn trees with paper craft, stuck autumn leaves etc etc. and I demonstrated by almost everyday shaking a real autumn tree outside which shed its yellow leaves down so the children learnt immediately or at least it was very effective for quick memory retention whereas when Cl's turn came to teach on 'Autumn' she decided to teach 'Autumn animals'....this made me think twice; do we really have Autumn animals?

And then, for a whole week she came up with one new animal everyday, talking about it for only 2-3 minutes, doing cutting sticking about it and then forgetting the animal entirely for the whole lifetime..! The animals she chose were also not very easy like hedgehog and squirrel and both these two have such a difficult word in German that I cannot read, pronounce or write them. The other things she chose were telling the children about chestnut ( a difficult name again in German), stone, twig, pine cone etc...

This week we had 'Halloween' as the topic and again it was her turn to prepare the lesson.( We prepare the lessons alternately week wise.) And guess what she taught the children? Dracula, vampire, witch, ghost and Halloween spiders...!!! You should see her talking to the little children about what is a Dracula and witch, singing a long Dracula song and expecting the children to sing after her when even I am unable to grasp the words of the song, making sounds of a witch' eeeeeeooooooooooo, eeeeeeeeeeeooooooooooo' which is more likely to make them think we are imitating cries of a wild forest bird and telling them that ghosts are scary spirits that come at night and scare people away.

It is exasperating to see her teach these things to 2-3 years old...who speak and understand only a limited vocabulary and still cannot say they want to go toilet or they are hungry, thirsty, tired or sleepy....

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