My Musing

I have just spent a week at the school where I will be doing my practicum. It had much more of an impact on me that the one day visits. I was able to see the students two or three times throughout the week and build a relationship with them. I spent the entire week in the wood shop with my sponsor teacher and felt extremely comfortable in that environment by the end of the week. I was given the opportunity to do some safety and operation demos on a couple of the tools and they all went smoothly. The first one could have been a bit smoother since it came up very suddenly, but the message was still passed on. The students also began to rely on me for some instruction and tips since the regular teacher usually had a lineup of students waiting to ask questions. The classes that I participated in was one grade 8 class, a grade 9/10 class, and a grade 11/12. The difference between the three was enormous and the older the class, the easier they were to manage by far. It was the level of exposure and experience that the students brought to the class that was the main factor. The grade 8’s had to be supervised with every opperation with power tools since it was their first or second time on the machines. The grade 9/10’s could be left alone for the most part but some incidents on the table saw changed that. In a two week period there had been 4 kickbacks on the table saw. Only one of them ended up causing any damage; a bruise on the hip. It was a remarkably fortunate teaching moment. The students got to see first hand the negative results when you do not follow the safety guidelines and in turn learned some respect for the machines. Two of the students were quite nervous to either do thin cuts on the table saw or even use the saw at all. With a little persuasion and some wise words the got back on and did just fine. For the week that I was there every student in that class had to ask permission and be supervised by either myself or the teacher. The grade 11/12 class was a dream. Almost every student was on task creating their own project or the project assigned by the teacher. There were at all different stages of the projects but making progress. There was little need to instruct them on operating the equipment, except the jointer. They could never wrap their head around using that properly. The instruction consisted of how to make some phase of their project work or some time to do that phase better. Overall, I had a wonderful time and could easily see myself doing that job for many years and have a great time doing it.