Reflection on Placement

Having gone through my first placement, a two week internship where I was teaching a grade 11 university level math class, I have learned much and have found areas in which I would like to improve. First though, some of my highlights was first just being able to get into a classroom and actually start teaching. It's been a few months of just in class time and it was nice to actually get into a school and begin to put into practice what we have been going over in our classes. I was a little nervous going into, but as I got settled in and got to know my class I felt very comfortable and excited to teach.

One of my favourite lessons was a lesson in which I showed a simple little animation using GeoGebra of transformations of exponential functions. I thought little of the animation going into the lesson, it was just something small that I wanted to include to help their understanding. However, going through the lesson and showing them the animation they really enjoyed seeing and it helped their understanding a lot, and as a whole I was much more impressed with how useful it was then what I was expecting, and so that was a pleasant surprise for me.

Exponential functions in GeoGebra

Some things that I would like to improve on would first be pacing the lesson. I found it sometimes difficult to know if I was approaching the material to quickly or slowly, and ensuring that students are understanding the material while also not getting bored by it. However, I'm sure with experience this will become easier. Another area that I would like to improve is motivating students to do their homework. I didn't check homework all the time, but just semi-regularly and I found that students weren't consistently doing their homework. I want to help students to understand the importance of homework, while also not overwhelming them with too much work, so that's an area that I want to improve in.