JA Community Service (Senior Year)
Junior Achievements (JA) is an organization that teaches K-12 students about skills needed in the real world such as financial literacy, work readiness, and entrepreneurship. Last year, I participated in JA's High School Heroes program for my WBL community service. To recap, this program has high school students teach elementary school students about business, with specific categories such as the role business plays in a city or nation or how businesses manage money. Like last year, we were first trained and given time to practice before teaching anyone. We were put in groups of 4-5 and learned the basics of how to behave around students, what our attire should be, how to interact with the young students, what the lesson we were teaching was, and many other things. This is also where we got feedback from our peers based on how we introduced ourselves and how we presented our lesson and planned who would teach what in our groups.
The day we were due to teach went much smoother than the previous year, something attributed to 2 factors - an older audience and more thorough preparation. Last year, we were teaching kindergarten, an audience that needed much more stimulation, but this year it was 3rd grade, an audience that was older enough to understand what we were teaching yet young and energetic enough not to fall asleep on us. This meant this year's group of children was a bit easier to manage than the previous. My group also typed out a script this year, so we had something to refer to on the day we taught. So when we started teaching that day, we mostly knew and executed our lesson plans without many setbacks and engaged the students well. There were still instances where we had to improvise, such as in the beginning when one of my teammates didn't understand how to do her activity or in my own lesson when the activity I was doing had too many steps and too little time, but with teamwork, we helped each other pull through. Overall, our time went pretty well and I was happy to see all the smiles on our students' faces.
This experience reinforced how different audiences require different needs. The contrast between last year's and this year's students showed me how even in a broad "young" demographic, differences still exist between age groups and it's this difference that one must always keep in mind when catering to this audience. Kindergarten and 3rd grade or both elementary school students but one required more stimulation and one could understand concepts more easily. This experience also reinforced how teaching is no easy job. Even though this year was easier to teach, it still required a good amount of effort to do so. You always have to make sure students are engaged and understand what you're teaching, otherwise, the entire lesson falls apart. Teachers really have to prepare and be ready to improvise, so it's not a very easy job.
The day we were due to teach went much smoother than the previous year, something attributed to 2 factors - an older audience and more thorough preparation. Last year, we were teaching kindergarten, an audience that needed much more stimulation, but this year it was 3rd grade, an audience that was older enough to understand what we were teaching yet young and energetic enough not to fall asleep on us. This meant this year's group of children was a bit easier to manage than the previous. My group also typed out a script this year, so we had something to refer to on the day we taught. So when we started teaching that day, we mostly knew and executed our lesson plans without many setbacks and engaged the students well. There were still instances where we had to improvise, such as in the beginning when one of my teammates didn't understand how to do her activity or in my own lesson when the activity I was doing had too many steps and too little time, but with teamwork, we helped each other pull through. Overall, our time went pretty well and I was happy to see all the smiles on our students' faces.
This experience reinforced how different audiences require different needs. The contrast between last year's and this year's students showed me how even in a broad "young" demographic, differences still exist between age groups and it's this difference that one must always keep in mind when catering to this audience. Kindergarten and 3rd grade or both elementary school students but one required more stimulation and one could understand concepts more easily. This experience also reinforced how teaching is no easy job. Even though this year was easier to teach, it still required a good amount of effort to do so. You always have to make sure students are engaged and understand what you're teaching, otherwise, the entire lesson falls apart. Teachers really have to prepare and be ready to improvise, so it's not a very easy job.
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