Mid-term review

I haven't updated this blog for a few days, since my days have been fully packed and I hardly have any time to sit down and think. My previous job in the business field was also busy, but it's entirely different from teaching at school level.

One, there were assistants who could help me with the administrative duties. Now I do everything from data entry to arranging photocopies.

Two, when I had lunch, it was always my own time and I could do whatever I wanted. Now things are entirely different, leaving little room for recovery of energy.

Three, teaching involves a lot of routine. When you spend extra time preparing a lesson, you risk having little time left for assignment feedback and other duties required by the school. But then if you can manage to spend extra time researching for teaching ideas in the library, getting well prepared for lessons and marking all the assignments, it only means you have done your job.

It seems that if you take a macroscopic view, "learning" is everywhere, but if we look at the Bloom's taxonomy below,

it can be seen that most of the school admin tasks requires only the bottom two levels, whereas lesson preparation might involve the higher levels including "synthesis" and "analysis", but it all depends on whether a teacher has enough time to think over it. Evaluation of the effectiveness, on the other hand, can be luxury, as the lessons often come one after another.

As for stimulation, staying at the same place teaching the same subject for a long time can kill the creativity for teaching; therefore, it seems that doing plenty of travel and getting out of the school to attend talks and talking to the others seem to be a good way to stay refreshed. Reading can be another way. The only problem is: do we have the time to do all that?

So maybe one more thing that we can learn from teaching is, how to manage time and prioritize tasks well. haha