So yeah I was planning on posting at the end of my first week. That obviously didn't happen, mainly due to the work involved in the course and partly due to my laptop deciding to massively overheat. The fact that half of the outer casing is half made of stainless steel probably doesn't help, but the fan's been loud for quite a while now and this was eventually going to happen I suppose, so sorting all that out took up one of my evenings.
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| At this point I was more than a little worried I'd lost it forever! |
As for the actual course though there are basically two types of days that we have, which I'll call pedagogical and subject knowledge;
pedagogical, for those who don't know what it means, is basically learning how to teach, classroom management, behaviour management and everything else that isn't subject specific. Whereas subject knowledge is, you guessed it, working on the secondary-level knowledge of your subject. I know this may seem strange at first but it actually is quite necessary. Subject knowledge days mainly focus on going over different methods to tackle a problem; after having done half a Bachelor's degree in maths, a lot of secondary-level content will just come naturally to us without having to explain how we solved that quadratic equation or how we multiplied out those brackets, whereas when teaching highschool children who are learning this stuff for the first time, you do have to be able to explain it.
We've also had a fair bit mentioned to us about posting stuff online, like, oh, I don't know, blogs (although I think I've been careful enough so far.) But Facebook was the main thing mentioned; we've basically been told not to post rants online if there's something about the course or our school that we don't like, which really is common sense more than anything. We've even been told not to post the name of our schools in case in the future we do put something bad about it and it can be referred back and land us in hot water. Again, it's common sense really. There's actually going to be a few sessions tomorrow on online safety, safeguarding children and protecting yourself so we'll see how they go.
On that note, we have also received our placements for the first term of the year, I suppose I can reveal that it's in Blackpool, but that's about it. Travel arrangements did at first look bleak as I'd have had to get the 6:30 train out of Lancaster every morning, until the penny dropped that I have family living quite close to Blackpool, so that's that settled for three nights a week! It's only three as most Fridays we're back in uni studying so I'd obviously need to be back in Lancaster on the Thursday.
