.66 LTO at Osgoode Township High School in Phys. Ed.

For the last month of school I was on an LTO at Osgoode Township High School in the Phys. Ed. Department. It was a .66, so I only taught two classes. Grade 11 and Grade 10 phys. ed. I had an awesome time! The only unit I had to teach was Softball, and then I had to do mark entry, and just hang out around the school, do some clean up in the gym for the last two weeks of my LTO. To be clear, I taught for the last two weeks of classes, then for the last two weeks I supervised exams, cleaned the gym, input marks, and promotion meetings.

It was the first season of "The Stoppels Show". In short, "The Stoppels Show" is my way of managing my classroom. I'm not going to give all my secrets away on the internet...at least until I land a full time job. This is one thing I'm going to save for an interview.

I learned a lot! Softball is an easy game to play and an easy game to teach. The only thing I wish I'd done differently was to spend more time on skills. I didn't give my students a lot of time to work on specific skills, such as throwing, and batting. As this was my first attempt at teaching a class, I thought I'd try to teach the game as we went along. I gave the students a chance to warm up each day where they could practice throwing and catching the ball, but I took this time to do attendance instead of offering feedback. Next time, I would spend more time giving feedback, than doing attendance.
After warm up, we would just play. I would split the class in two, one team was fielding and one team was batting. As the unit was winding down, I could tell that there was a large improvement in some of the weaker students. The guys that could not throw, catch, or hit very well at the beginning of the unit had improved big time. I made sure to give everyone lots of opportunity to practice the skills, but I did not give much useful feed back. I would be very positive and encouraging, but there was not a lot of specific feedback. That is something I would change when I get to try it again.

Promotion meetings were a very interesting part of the job as well. I don't really like making phone calls in the first place, but then to have to call a parent to tell them that their child has failed a class, or will not be allowed to graduate is not a fun phone call to make. Luckily I did not have to call a parent to let them know that their child was not going to graduate. As I said, it was an interesting experience.

I had tons of fun teaching this class, but one of the worries I had was showing favorites. One of my cousins was in the class and his best friend. I see these two guys outside of school, at family functions so I know them both really well. Also, one of my parents’ neighbors was in the class, who I know really well from when I lived with my parents. This was all in my grade 11 co-ed class. At the end of the course, I asked the class to give me some feedback about things I did well and things I could have done better, and one of the comments that came up repeatedly was "didn't show favorites". So I was really happy about that! The class was generally pretty good in the first place, I didn't have a lot of behavioral problems, but it did come up that I had to discipline my cousin’s best friend. And I treated him the same way I treated everyone. I was worried about being to soft on them, but also I was worried about being too hard on them to compensate for knowing them. It ended up not being a problem, but it was something I thought I should be conscious about.
I could always tell when a teacher had a favorite student in their class, and sometimes it was me, but most of the time it wasn't. And I didn't have a problem with them having a student that they joked around with more than others or talked to more often than others, but the times that it mattered was when it came to discipline. When the "favorite" would do something wrong and suffered a lesser punishment because he or she was the favorite, that sent a message to the whole class. This is why it is something that I am conscious about in my own classroom.

Again, just to finish, this was a great opportunity and learning experience for me. It gave me a taste of what it was like to have my own class with my own rules. It was awesome, and again, I can't wait until next time!