Internship at Hilton 2015

I have had a great time working with Thulani and Evan Thus far, I have been in charge of the grade 8 SAL class since the beginnig of Term 2. I have worked with the grade 10 IsiZulu class, teaching a few language and grammar lessons and that has brought a lot of insight and depth into my understanding of the language and teaching techniques.

This is quite a late post and you might remember that the winter sports season kicked into play before the long term holidays. Since then I've been assigned to the U15 age group, coaching the U15E team and working quite closely with Shaun and Mark. We've had a couple of games thus far and the U15 age group as whole has had some difficulties in getting right, a lot of the fundamentals of the sport; resulting in a few unfortunate defeats against schools such as Westville, Kearsney and Michealhouse to name but a few. Our last fixture as U15E went really well against Maritzburg CA and we managed to go down by just 5 points in comparison with our previous fixtures. 

This is a rather late post, but about a week ago we ended the basketball season and the transition to winter sports took place. Basketball in a nutshell was a rather challenging season and the boys really struggled to amalgamate and work as a team due to a variety of changes that took place throughout the season. We suffered a number of defeats against our main rival schools and only had one victory against Clifton. At the end of the season, I was encouraged to have an end of season discussion with the boys, in which we reflected on the season, my coaching and  basketball as a sport in the school. The boys had some very positive feedback as well as some areas of concern; which I really took note of. I am very accomodative of constructive criticism because I believe that the moment there is nothing you're getting wrong then growth is also being confined.

This is an introduction to story writing, what the boys think about it and what their definition of a story is. The speaker is concerned with motivating the boys to look a little closer into their own lives and understanding that writing a story is as easy as writing about yourself and what is happening in your life . She gives them ideas of what it is they can write about and how they can start thinking along the lines of how to start writing about themselves.  This is very interesting and has been educational for me as an aspiring teacher because I have gathered some ideas around how to approach my own literature writing and how I can go about expressing myself.  What I also gathered in this workshop is the importance of pin pointing the objectives of your presentation so that the learners, especially at the junior level, can be clear with what it is youre getting across and what it is you want them to grasp from your presentation. 

I've been quite impressed with the number of learners in my isiZulu class, because it really allows for individual attention. And that enhances my ability as a teacher to maximize all my objectives. I think being a young teacher also gives me an edge in that it allows me to relate to the learners very easily; so I find my isiZulu lessons very interesting and exciting. There is common ground which I then matipulate into fabricating an atmosphere within which learning can flourish. However the IsiZulu second additional language class is far less of a challenge, as I had predicted, hence I have branched out into working with first additional as well as grade 10s.

I had to do some History marking today, it was quite interesting to see how the boys have understood the work taught in class and seeing their understanding in how they have expressed the content that was taught.