School stuff

I'm just sitting through another meeting. This one's about the year 2 demonstration class. Every now and then each year level will have to do a demo class and the other teachers come and watch and take notes and afterwards they have a meeting like today to discuss it. The teachers give feedback and impressions about what they saw, the teacher who was running the class answers questions they have and explains what they are trying to acheive with the activity they were teaching and so on. Generally all the meetings are a pain in the arse for me because I really just don't care what happens with the kids. But I do reckon it's a good idea for the teachers to see what each other are getting up to and how they are teaching various things. In Japan primary school teachers can be teaching year 1 one year and then year 6 the next year so it's good that they get a chance to see what's going on in other grades regularly I think. I've never taught in Australia but I did do work experience at a primary school when I was in year 10 and I don't remember the teachers having so much dialogue about what they were teaching and how and so on, they seemed to be very much left to their own devices. Perhaps it would be better if teachers had more opportunity at home to watch each others classes. I had some pretty awful teachers in primary school and if they had been observed by other teachers in the school maybe they might have been discovered and kicked out earlier. Of course it probably works the other way too and teachers get criticised too much by their workmates. I remember when I had to do a demo English class with the year 5 teacher at Nishi, in the meeting afterwards they got fully stuck into it. They asked me for my opinion at one stage right out of the blue, I wasnt even listening to them really. I said that I didn't think it was too great that the Japanese teacher did most of the teaching because they cant speak English and they got quite upset about that. Nishi is the only school that insists on having the Jap teacher running the English classes - it just makes no sense at all but they won't be budged on it. So I can see how some teachers might take the opportunity to just get stuck into those they don't like, as Iishi did with me.