I had a great start to this week as we got to spend Monday in the workshop making things. We first made a small boat using chisels, rasps, disc sanders, drills, we are able to set up and use the ban saw and pillar drills, things I hadn’t used in a very long time. In the afternoon we made a box using a desk router and a mitre guillotine, I had never used on of these before, it was quite a scary looking thing. I found pretty hard to use, fortunately they don’t really have these in schools.
After spending the day playing with wood we had a small workshop about dyslexia, what it is and how to spot it in students. The following morning we had our final GPS lecture of 2011 about behaviour and classroom management. We were given a few ideas and tips, making sure you know the students names is really important as when you need to discipline a certain student your words will sink in more if you call the student by their name, it shows respect. Permanent exclusion was also discussed and the affect this has on a student. From this I have been reading about how schools are starting to illegal exclude students who are preforming badly to keep their league tables up, terrible! There is so much I am learning about the politics revolving around schooling systems that are destroying my soul a little bit.
This week we started our first school placement, me school is Davenant Foundation School in Loughton, Essex. I had heard great things about this school and was pretty excited to go. It is a teacher training school so my first 2 days were spent with 4 other PGCE students in the training room where we met the Head, got to talk to a previous Goldsmiths PGCE student who is now dong his NQT year at Davenant and were given all sorts of information about the school and in the afternoon we were treated by 2 short plays from the year 13 drama students. They acted out 2 classroom scenarios where the teacher lost control of the classroom, it definitely showed us what not to do. I met my mentor on this first day too, she is brilliant, really nice, helpful and knows what she is talking about, I think I will learn a lot from year. Day 2 we met with the Deputy Head, her presentation was quite hard to sit through. She spoke to us about cases of child abuse and times when child protection has to be called, we had to discuss how we would handle these situations, what signs to look out for and who to tell. We then learned about our legal rights as teachers and what you can and can’t do in schools. As luck would have it, that day there was also a fire drill so we now know what the protocol is if a fire should occur. The school closed early that day as there was a parents evening that night. I went over to the Design and Technology department where I got to meet Yazz the Head of the department and John the technician, I helped them set up for the parents evening, asked some questions about my time here in the next 2 weeks and then headed home.
Friday was spent back at Goldsmiths where we all discussed our experiences in our new schools; it was great to hear how everyone had been getting on and how different all of our first 2 days had been. We had a lecture in the afternoon from Steve Keirl on Design Ethics, it was great. We spoke about the comparisons of right and wrong, morals and values, and how these are different to different people and cultures. We spoke about how species and technology and connected and what this means. He told us about how the design process comes into ethics and how problems only really come out when things are tested and there are consequences and the whole design process starts again to resolve this.
Information overload this week, relaxing weekend to be had!
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