This week has been pretty busy. Work is starting to get busier with the semester underway. Tutoring is pretty slow the first few weeks because no one has any assignments due, but by Week 3 people start having actual papers and Spanish students realize they need to get their required visits over with, so they come in. Since I'm doing some of my Practicum II hours in a Spanish 1100 class (first semester Spanish), I feel like my tutoring is going better because I know exactly where the students are and what they've learned.
One of the best things, in my opinion, about the MATESOL program here at HPU is that we have so many opportunities for practical experiences. We have "microteaching" in most of our classes, which is when we teach our classmates a 10-minute activity. It's a great chance to get feedback from our peers. We also have a whole semester of Practicum I, which among other things gives us lots of observation hours in a bunch of different settings, which was so valuable.
Now in Practicum II, we're placed in one (or two) classes for a longer period of time. It's great, because you get to know the students and the class and the mentor teacher pretty well. What's extra awesome about HPU's practicum courses is that they're quite flexible and you can have a lot of choice in where you do it, so I'm really fortunate to be doing mine in two places this semester! For the first half, I'm in the SPAN 1100 class, and for the second half, I'm in an ESL academic writing class. I'm excited about it because not only do I get two very different and very valuable experiences to learn from, but the program will give me a letter saying I did student teaching in both English and Spanish, which will be great when I apply to future jobs! Since I'm not 100% sure where I want to end up in the future, it's nice to have the double option of teaching ESL or Spanish. Even though the MATESOL program is focused on English, primarily, lots of alumni go on to teach other foreign languages as well, so it really does give you a lot of options!
Anyway, speaking of Practicum II, I solo-taught an activity this week! I was pretty nervous, and it didn't go perfectly (does teaching EVER go perfectly? This is a real question!), but I think overall it went pretty well! My mentor teacher gave me some great feedback and I definitely plan to incorporate it into the next activity I teach. I was so nervous about this activity that I made my boyfriend be my "trial student" the night before, because I figured if he understood my directions, then a first semester Spanish class would. And I was right! Not everything went according to plan, but my directions weren't the problem. (Lost materials was the problem, and of course they were found about 5 minutes after the lesson!)
And now, because I feel like a blog post without a photo is boring (my father once told me that my blog posts were too long and no one wanted to read about all the minutiae of my day and to just post photos... and if my own father said that then I assume everyone else is thinking it!), here's a photo of me and my lovely classmate Kat on a hike we did over winter break at the Lanikai Pillboxes. It had great views!
Keep an eye out next week for an update on my trip to Kauai! :)
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