This practice teaching helps me a lot to answer the questions that bothers my mind like how will I handle students with odd behavior? What if teaching is not for me? How I will cope up with a different environment? Those questions are just some of the mind blobbing thoughts that haunt me when we are about to begin this journey.

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              The twelve weeks of our stay in Baao Central School becomes really meaningful. The ten weeks of practice teaching was a tremendous growth for me both in my personality and as an educator. We were assigned to a public school in Baao District. Elementary pre-service teachers should be assigned to both primary (grades 1-3) and intermediate (grades 4-6). On my first shift, I am assigned to grade 6 Hyacinth which is the last section of the three sections in grade 6.  My class in first shift consists of 39 individuals. I find it really challenging since I’m not used to that kind of environment. My cooperating teacher is a Master Teacher II which I first get really intimidated, as the days passes by I get used to her authoritative voice. On the first three days I observed my cooperating teacher on how to handle and interact with the students when it comes to instruction. The next 4 weeks is the most terrifying as well as daunting days of my student life. I didn’t know if what I’m doing is right or maybe it is prohibited. The few weeks for my second shift turn out as okay as well.

            I get the point of letting student teachers experience both primary and the intermediate environment. The problem is here, the strategies from the two different teachers are really different, the different perspective of the two different individual that you are trying to jive in the course of your stay. In some cases, teachers don’t let their student teachers use their own strategy or they don’t let the student teachers explore to what extent that their knowledge is. They say that practice teaching makes or breaks a teacher. I can say that that kind of cooperating teacher maybe breaks a (student) teacher. I’m not saying that all teachers are like that, but our education system is really like that. We should not go with the river.

 

        This practice teaching helps me to realize some things, realizations that I should keep to myself alone, because this realizations doesn’t give a damn to anybody else. I’m not even sure if someone is willing to waste some minutes of her life to read this.

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         Indeed practice teaching is one of the stages wherein a pre-service teacher will put into practice all the things that they have learned in their 3 and half years of schooling in teacher education programs.