Monday, March 7, 2011

Lay off the Public Speaker

Today I and many of my cohortee's and many others from the High-School PDPP went to a workshop where a speaker talked to us about teaching 'Career and Personal Planning 10' (CAPP 10), a course the government requires all high-school students to take in school, and a subject that often gets thrown onto first-year teachers, because, well, nobody else wants to teach it.

I didn't mind attending the workshop at all - it was in place of, though longer than, one of my courses, but I took it at face value when they said it would be good to attend because it looks good to prospective employers (principals) when you say you'd be happy to teach a block or two of CAPP in your first year, something many teachers aren't happy to do.

Unfortunately, though, a couple people from other cohorts acted belligerent part way through the workshop, unnecessarily questioning, interrupting, and giving the presenter a hard time, as if he was wasting their time.

I say: Fuck Off, PDPP students. It's one thing to disagree with a public speaker (who's only there for our benefit), but it's another thing to badger said public speaker when he's there on his own time. One student made some resentful remark about the terminology the speaker used about 'money' vs "currency", and another, a young woman, badgered the public speaker about the validity of him taking her precious time away from classes she was 'investing' in her education. I can't help but think that both of these future-teachers wouldn't take too kindly to their students, in the future, giving them lip or inturrupting their lectures with petty minutiae as they did him today. More to the point, as future teachers shouldn't we ought to be more considerate to the people giving their time and knowledge to us at the front of the class? I think so.

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