bak 2 skool

New experiences...

So, I went and signed up for this elective where I'm supposed to teach at a primary/high school each week. It's pretty different from all the other units I've done so far in my course, but I figured, hey, why not try something different?

So anyway, I'm supposed to go down to this school every week and teach for around two hours. Charles, my supervisor, seems like a nice guy, and he's arranged for me to teach at a primary school around my area (Canyon South Primary).

Well I went down to the school this afternoon with Charles to meet up with the teacher at the school. The school seems like quite a nice place: a few buildings for offices and classrooms, a hall and plenty of open area for the kids to run around in. They're all single-storied buildings, which is quite a change from back home where all the schools are four to six stories high. I suppose I should be used to that by now, though.

So, apparently I'll be working with this teacher, Lisa Manson. She teaches a Primary 5/6 class, which is basically a class that's kinda like a composite of primary five and six students. Half the students (P6) will leave the school at the end of the year, the current P5 students get promoted to P6, and a new bunch of P5 students (currently P4) join the class. It's actually quite an interesting concept, again quite different from back home.

So, Lisa's pretty nice as well. We talked a little bit about ourselves to gain an understanding of each other's skills and knowledge. I originally thought I would be teaching something related to mechanical design, like CAD or drafting, but Lisa said the school doesn't really have a CAD program (which makes sense since CAD's actually quite expensive), and drafting may be a little too advanced, and in particular, a little too dry for the kids.

In a slightly surprising turn of events, she actually wants me to teach web design. That's absolutely fine by me, naturally, since I've been dabbling in webdev on-and-off for about three years now. In particular, she wants me to teach the class Dreamweaver, which is great. I'm much better at Dreamweaver than the other webdev software out there, and I'm sure we all know that Micro$oft's Frontpage is a pathetic excuse for a webdev package, so Dreamweaver suits me just fine.

Lisa actually has some IT knowledge; she used to be kinda like a part-time systems admin for the school so she knows about networking and stuff. And she also teaches the class stuff like word and powerpoint. However, she doesn't really know much about webdev, and I guess that's probably the reason why she's interested in me doing Dreamweaver and stuff.

We discussed a little about the kind of objectives she wants me to achieve during my stay with them, and these are a lot more vague and general than the typical project brief we get in engineering. Basically, she just wants me to teach the class the basics behind web design. In particular, she wants me to talk about how to plan and manage a webdev project. Since the principles are similar with planning and managing a normal project, she's trying to kill two birds with one stone, as they say, and introduce the kids into some basic project management techniques.

Besides these, I'm of course also expected to teach the kids the basics behind using Dreamweaver. We decided that stuff like hand-coding and CSS and scripting would be a little too advanced for the kids, so just simple stuff like formatting, creating links, that sort of stuff.

She also wants me to help a small group of students to set up a class web page. Apparently, they've got a computer lab here with over 20 computers, but they're all Macs. That's quite a weird choice, to me. I mean, I know that a lot of professionals in some particular industries like publishing, editorial and even webdev like to use Macs, but the majority of the world still uses Windows. Heck, even full-time geeks use Linux instead of Mac OSX. So it seems a weird choice to me to have a computer lab full of Macs. But hey, it's not really my business to question what they like to use in school, eh? ;)

So anyway, thankfully there are four Windows PCs in the classroom itself that can be loaded up with Dreamweaver. A big WOW to advances in technology. I remember when I was in Primary school; I don't think most of us even had a computer at home much less learn how to create websites in school. Man, this is starting to make me feel old. :P

So anyway, we agreed for me to go back to the school next Wednesday around 2.30pm for an initial observation session, just for about an hour or so. Basically just to introduce myself to the class and explain what we would be doing and all that. Should be fun. I'm actually looking forward to a unit for a change. :P

posted by Scott @ 6:53 pm