Teaching grade 5

On the teacher’s day of 2015, I realized that teaching is not an easy job. I came to this realization while teaching a class of grade 5 to celebrate teacher’s day. My friend Kripa Patel and I had to teach that class for 2 hours. This activity was extremely challenging and also a great learning experience.

The most challenging part of this activity was getting the grade 5 kids to maintain the decorum in the class. The students were not listening to us and were just creating a chaos. Some students were running here and there, some were talking with their friends and others were busy playing games and watching videos on their Chromebooks. In the end to stop all this chaos we had to shout on some of the children to get them to listen to us.

Another challenge that we faced during the activity was not being able to stick to our plan that we had created before we went to teach the class. We had planned to show them a video, however, due to technical difficulties we were not able to do so. Hence, we had to immediately prepare a new course of action, which was to divide the students into two groups and have them debating on multiple activities. This way we were able to not waste their or our time.

Through this activity I realized that I still need to work on my leadership skills and I also learned the importance of contingency planning. With better leadership skills I would have been able to better handle the class and the students and with a proper contingency planning I might have been able to make the learning experience for the students more smooth.

I was really glad that I did this activity with my friend because I do not think I would have alone been able to get the students to listen to me. This activity made me realize how working collaboratively adds more skills to the group and also how problems become so much more easier to solve when they are shared with others.