How gender affected my education?

When I was at primary school I don’t remember any differences between how the girls and boys were treated differently. In our play time I remember not wanting to play imaginative games with the girls and would rather of ran round playing football with the boys so that is what I did. However the boys didn’t see a problem with this and neither did the teachers however the girls in my class used to be strange about the idea. I presume this was because they saw the rest of their gender doing one thing and I was doing something different. However I remember there being a football club and those girls who found it strange for me to play at play times used to come.

The divide between boys and girls I first saw was when I went to secondary school and when we were picking sports in P.E. to do, some sports girls weren’t allowed to do like rugby and the boys were rarely seen playing netball. Some pupils felt very out of place and argued to be able to play the same as the other gender as that’s what they would have preferred and it could be said it stopped them from developing a liking for that sport.

When I was at school I don’t remember there being a difference between how behaviour was dealt with as lessons didn’t have more disturbances from one gender than the other. However there was one teacher who preferred girls to boys and would offer to do lots of work for the girls to get there projects completed.

 

Why I want to be a teacher.

The first time I realised I wanted to be a teacher was when I had finished primary school and started helping at the local brownie group. I realised that I enjoyed seeing the girls develop into more confident individuals and because of the positive and enthusiastic teaching the girls received from this you saw them become their own character and seemed to develop. Being a Brownie myself meant that I could see how I developed because of what I learnt at Brownies and became more confident in my life. When I was helping at Brownies I would help with small group tasks and also playing games with the whole group. I also realised that I wanted to be a teacher when I was helping out at my local church group every month and because of the gap in time you saw the children become more independent quite quickly. The older children used to take in turns reading the story and I would see them become better and need less prompting for it. When I had taught something at the Brownie group or at the church group and you saw the children processing it and understanding it, it made you feel like you had done something positive to someone else’s life and therefore they may go help others in some way to do the same thing and the community may benefit from this.

 

The kind of teacher I would like to become is an enthusiastic one so that children are more engaged with the lessons that are being taught. I would like to be an easy to come to teacher so if they had any problems they could come to me to talk about them. I also think I would like to be able to teach the lessons in a fun way so that even if the subject may not be seen as interesting to them they find it interesting in the way that its taught for example playing a game instead of just listening to a teacher about it.

Like in the story Matilda by Roald Dahl I would rather be like Miss Honey than Miss Trunchbull. This is because I wouldn’t want the children to be scared to come ask me any questions or express their own opinions. I also think that they should feel safe when at school regardless of what is happening at home, school should be a safe haven for them. I also think that students should be encouraged in any way they can be as this way they can grow into their own characters rather than exact copies of each other.

 

 

Welcome to your WordPress eportfolio

Welcome to your eportfolio. This is where you will document and share your professional thoughts and experiences over the course of your study at the University of Dundee and beyond that when you begin teaching. You have the control over what you want to make public and what you would rather keep on a password protected page.

The eportfolio in the form of this WordPress blog allows you to pull in material from other digital sources:

You can pull in a YouTube video:

You can pull in a Soundcloud audio track:

You can pull in a Flickr page

Teacher, Lorraine Lapthorne conducts her class in the Grade Two room at the Drouin State School, Drouin, Victoria

You can just about pull in anything that you think will add substance and depth to your writing.