Be Comfortable With The Uncomfortable

My fiancé and I will be moving back to NZ mid year, so we decided that I wasn't going to take a full time gig this year. We knew this would give us greater flexibility to travel and I would have less stress and pressure being a reliever. The last few weeks we have been skiing in Japan to start these travel adventures. As we were heading to our last chairlift of the trip last Thursday my phone started ringing from a random Adelaide number. It was Plympton International College and they wanted me for a 7 week contract starting today!! This was super unexpected and I was actually looking forward to being a relief teacher for this term, but I decided to jump into the deep end and take the gig. I am very out of my comfort zone because I have been given a Y8 Maths class (certainly NOT my strength!). I'm nervous about this new curriculum area but I am hoping it'll give me new knowledge to have greater numeracy connections in HPE in the future, and develop new skills/teaching strategies. 

Today was my first day and it was awful. I really didn't feel supported and I was expected to be teaching 10 minutes after I had arrived even though I had just been given my classes and I hadn't stepped foot in the school before! I was assuming I would have a couple of hours to have a tour, check out the notes from the teacher I was covering and some prep time for my lessons. Thankfully I was able to wing my way through the day but requested to have the day tomorrow, which was thankfully granted. I left today feeling very rattled, frustrated and like a lone wolf. I left feeling like I made a mistake taking this short contract, so I really hope that changes over the next week or so! This really highlighted to me the importance of support - I would love to become a HOD one day and support will be a major priority!!

Even though I've come home today feeling flat and uncertain about this change, I have reminded myself about the importance of stepping out of my comfort zone and that this is another opportunity to develop my resilience. Yubing Zhang's below Ted Talk is great food for thought with regard to getting to the edge of our comfort zones. A question she posed that you could ask yourself is: "What is it that you are not doing because of a fear of failure?"

Smoothing Out The Transition To Secondary

Y6 students who are starting at MHS next year had a transition day today - a little taster into what life will be like at a secondary school next year. As part of the day, the Y6 students had a double lesson of PE and my OUED class were asked to run this. This was a great opportunity for us to spend the last couple of weeks leading up to transition day linking back to our Group Dynamics unit and compare how my students were interacting with each other now to the beginning of the semester. We had some great discussion around Tuckman's stages of group development and where there had been shifts across the stages.

Unfortunately some of my students didn't show up for transition day, but we made the day work and the kids that were there did a great job. It was a great final lesson for the year. Running activities for a large group of students with a lot of energy is challenging for teachers let alone 13/14 year olds! They knew that this was a great opportunity for leadership experience though, which is a key skill to develop in OUED. A few of them really took the role seriously and I could see they were reflecting with their partners after each of their rotations to try and make their activity 'better'.

The structure of the day, the number of students and several teachers was an organisational experience for me too. I don't often plan events like this and in fact I don't know whether I had organised anything with this many moving parts on my own before! I certainly enjoyed planning and going on camps more, but it was still experience nevertheless. Although I was running around like a headless chicken for nearly two hours (great for my steps!) and there were some things that could have been changed, overall the session ran pretty smoothly. The Y6s had a taste into a variety of team building activities (such as obstacle courses, creating shelters and relays) as well as a mixture of invasion and target games including floor hockey, number games and beanbag throws - so I feel we met the brief!

I do enjoy organising things so event management could be something I dabble in more. In the future maybe I could keep an eye out for opportunities to develop these skills further. Next week is Activities Week so today was also my last teaching day at Marryatville! Here's to the next chapter, whatever that may bring...