Long day...

And that's putting it lightly. We had a 9:30 start for our subject group meeting, most of which was used to practice writing lesson plans. Very useful stuff, especially considering that student plans need to be exhaustive as mentors and tutors need to see every step of our planning. Of course, once fully qualified the plans can be condensed so obvious stuff doesn't need to be included, but in the meantime, it's a long process. We looked at each stage of the lesson plan and exactly what needs to go where, along with the actual lesson timetable so we could see how time was allocated too. We were also allocated our Microteaching groups today. Essentially we were split up into groups of two (I seem to be in a three for some reason) and were given a random topic to deliver a 10-minute lesson on to the rest of the group. Of all the topics we could have pulled out, we got one to the effect of explain why poo is brown and log shaped! I'm dead fucking serious! Well... at least we can literally talk shit for 10 minutes.

After lunch is where it all started going downhill. We had our first Professional Studies lecture today, an hour lecture on whether teachers could be considered professional. Well, if you'd have seen the lecture theatre... there must have been 250 people in there and at least half of them were nodding off. In fact, the guy next to me actually DID nod off! It honestly felt like I was back in the old Data Analysis lectures at UCL. Very basic PowerPoint slides in black and white with only writing on, and material that to be perfectly honest wasn't really all that interesting. Finally, we had a seminar straight after to reflect on the lecture, and it went much better. Mainly because it was referring to real teaching scenarios rather than simply the history of teaching. It seems each seminar will be split into a short reflection of the lecture, followed by a hypothetical task for group discussion.

Wasn't too bad today to be honest. Just long...