Reflections on Teachers and Teaching

Teaching is a tough work. It is hard to teach students especially if they are not paying attention to you or if they are making fun of you because they know that you are just a student teacher. Now I know what the teachers experience. They are trying hard to explain and let us understand the lessons well and they are doing this in order for their students to have a lot of knowledge so that they can have a better future and can find and apply for a better job. They are also trying hard to earn money for their family needs and to support the education of their children. They even sleep late just to prepare for the lessons that they will tackle on the next day and to compute the performances and grades of the students, which they are handling. On our Know Your School Day Activity, the teachers let the students experience how hard is teaching some students especially the mischievous ones.

In our Know Your School Day Activity, I applied and experienced teaching in our Filipino subject. It is a group teaching and we are seven in the group. My teaching mates are Janelle Faith del Mar, Jeny-vi Bartolome, Jurrine Valencia, Irene Gonzales, John Rhey Balmori and Rosa Gabriela Sanchez. We really have fun in teaching our classmates because my co-student teachers are both humorists and are really very witty. We discussed some of the stanzas of our Filipino book, Ibong Adarna. At first, in our introduction, we prepared games for them. Their task is to find some of the words hidden by Janelle everywhere in our classroom and to position it in the board. After it, we called a student, who did not partake in finding the words, to let his/her arrange the words accordingly to form the heading of the lesson that we are going to discuss. After the game, I and my co-student teachers read at least two stanzas each. After the two stanzas, we discuss what it meant and read on the next two stanzas and so on. After the seven of us have read, we let our classmates read the rest. After letting them read, we discuss the stanzas of our lesion one by one. Then, we answered the activities in the book orally. It is about Identifying the Synonyms of the Words. I did not feel bored when I am teaching my classmates but instead, I felt very blissful and I really have fun teaching them especially, as what I have mentioned earlier, my co- student teachers were humorists. But, at first, I really felt nervous, very tensed, and I was also shaking because I was not used to it. I was not used in standing in front of the class and report or discuss a lesson.

My Know Your School Day experience is so great and full of excitement! I will really apply again for a student teacher in my second year here in the University of the Philippines High School in Cebu, but of course, I will try again in other subjects. I hope it will also be fun and exciting on my second year here in the university.