Feild trip: South Africa Style

Today I was faced with an interesting task, take 38 students on a field trip by myself. Let's just say it was very different than any field trip I have ever been on. There was no organization to see who was actually going, so when the students at the University asked my how many students I had I couldn't really tell them. We counted 38, and we hoped that we had not lost anyone in the hour since we had been there. The first part of the field trip was all gym games, and mostly unorganized. The program that my students were attended is put on by the University of Stellenbosch every Thursday and a couple classes from the area comes to participate. The students who run the program are all pre-service teachers. Upon seeing the first event I was kind of mad I was missing instructional time to see my students run around doing nothing. But that changed fast when we moved on to the next area which they called lessons. Yet when we first got there the students were watching a movie, Rio. So I was even more mad, but in the end the last 2 hours that I spent at the University I got to observe pre-service teachers teaching small groups of students. It was set up where one student was teaching a group of 8-10 learners and then there was a professor observing. While this was happening in one room I was sitting behind the glass with other pre-service teachers observing. When I saw this happening it all clicked why my classroom here runs like it does, there is never instruction just work that needs to be done and that is exactly what was happening in these observations. I had a great talk with some other pre-service teachers afterward and they broke down their whole education program for me. They spend about 1/2 the amount of time in an actual classroom and there is no classroom management taught, which one of the students said could be really beneficial. Overall it was a great experience. I am still learning a lot about my students, and what they actually know since I am not seeing lessons taught but Friday is my big day of teaching something, anything.