Student mode....

Today is the first day of semester two. I'm finding that I'm still very much in teacher mode, and therefore making the transition back into student mode is a little difficult. That said, love my kids as I do, it is a nice change to not have to watch 27 six year olds simultaneously. It really is very exhausting. Anywho, like many things in life, some of which I have previously written about in this blog, I am realising that I also have a routine that I follow on the first day of Uni.

Typically, I spend the morning of the first day finding the room codes that my classes will be held in and locating the rooms on a map of JCU. I really struggle with the JCU interactive map because you can't turn it upside down; and as every woman knows, this is the only way that a map can be read. Ideally I would have done this task on the weekend, however it often is left until Monday morning as the weekend is spent recovering from placement. After this I drive to my first class. I'm usually late, but only a little bit late, and it's the stupid interactive map's fault anyway. I walk into the room and take a seat towards the front, because I am far too easily distracted to sit at the back. I then turn to the person seated next to me and ask the same question that I ask at the beginning of every semester; "What class is this?". It takes every ounce of my organisational ability to sit myself down in the right room at roughly the right time... remembering the name of the class is asking too much. I then sit for 50 minutes, focusing all of my energy on listening to what is being said, before performing this sequence of events all over again in the next lecture.

While I was enduring today's SOSE lecture, I stumbled across a new breed of annoying student. I was probably already feeling a little bit annoyed and over-critical because my SOSE lecturer says soze instead of sose. For some reason that bothers me. ANYWAY. We're all familiar with out-spoken mature age students who insist on adding their two cents whenever the lecturer so much as pauses to take a breath. In primary/early childhood circles, these students are usually women. However. Today I discovered the male outspoken mature age student. There is a distinct difference between male and female mature age students in primary/early childhood classes. The female mature age students are usually Mums, and therefore at least have a basic understanding of how young children are wired. Male mature age students, on the other hand, do not. During today's SOSE lecture we were discussing various issues that arise from social and environmental studies that might interest young children. Our friend, the male mature age student in the front row (who by this stage had already spent his two cents as far as I was concerned), raised his hand and said "Six year olds are too busy trying to think about tying their shoes to think about anything else". Now, perhaps I am overly sensitive about comments like this after spending three weeks teaching grade one, however I happily joined the chorus of "tsk tsk tsk's" that erupted from the Mums in the front row. I'm not really sure how you could make it through two and a half years of primary or early childhood education and still have such a poor understanding of children. Now, before you call me a bra-burning tofu-inhaling feminist, I'm sure that not all men have such a naive understanding of children. I have many male friends who seem to understand children quite well. I'm sure that I still have a lot to learn about how children work. But really, at this stage in our degree, we should at least know that kids love to actively explore and question their environment.

End rant. I'm off to another lecture.