SCIENCE PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE

In semester One of university you are learning many different skills from writing an essay to learning how to cook a ‘healthy meal’ and all the different skills in between. Time flies by and it is often easy to forget about all the different moments you have experienced until it is all behind you.

I am going to take some time to reflect on Semester One and think about a critical moments from my professional practice and how it has affected me.

This critical moment would probably be the realisation about how important it is for primary school teachers to co-operate and work alongside social workers and community education workers. I had known there would be some collaboration however I had not realised the full extent of the working together that is involved and the similarities between all the professions.

This was significant for me as it again reinforced the idea that being a primary school teacher is not just about teaching the children in your class, it is also about pupils health and wellbeing and knowing when extra help is needed. It is also important to realise as a teacher that you simply cannot do everything and fix everything and sometimes the appropriate thing to do is to call a social worker and then offer support where necessary.

This has also changed my stereotypes of these professions and understand their importance in society.

This has affected my professional practice as I will now be more inclusive and understanding towards working together.

Through my reading go ‘Mathematics Explained for Primary Teachers (Haycock, D.) it was clear to see that is absolutely essential to understand the maths you are teaching because if you do not then you can not expect the children to fully understand it.

This helps me put my mind at ease after years of worrying that everyone else in my class could do maths yet I still struggled despite my genuine efforts. However it seems my classmates and I fell under the spell of rote learning and simply memorised the rules of how to do maths calculations rather than understanding how to do maths calculations.

In the few months before my National 5 Maths examination I did all the past papers a few times and this evidenced my rote learning as I learnt the rules for each question. Although, to be able to use these rules I had to understand what rules the question was asking of me and so I finally realised that for the first time in my life I had begun to understand mathematics.

After not doing Maths since National 5 I am anxious to have to stand in front of a classroom and teach it but after seeing how well I could do maths after working very hard I know that I will just have to put the same amount of dedication in to be able to teach and understand primary school mathematics.