Day 49: 5/19/2018
This day has come, a better day. Overall, it has been a better than compared to several previous ones. I am not sure if it is because the supervision meeting is soon approaching or it is because of the internal urge I have felt recently.
Many things happened today. Like always, I woke up to my alarm clock. I did not even delay a bit today. YAY! Then I checked my phone, spending about half an hour on this. (I know this is counterproductive and should never come before work but it will get better with practice. :) ) Then I made myself some coffee and went straight to study.
Throughout the day, I was able to stay focused better. I used the trick I used to do before, turning my cell phone to flight mode and set an alarm for an hour. Even though there were some interruptions in between my sessions, I was still able to switch back to the study mode. GREAT!
On a side note, I had to stop for an hour to witness the Royal Wedding between Prince Harry and Megan. I could not help because why not? since I am now in England, right?
I started reading a new book today, Exploring Talk in School. I very much enjoyed the book since its Chapter 1, Exploratory Talk for Learning. It was actually the second (or twentieth time, maybe) I read about Barnes’ exploratory talk. Still, I was fascinated by his ideas and his simple writing and yet sophisticated writing. I believe this is because I can totally relate to what he was trying to say in terms of classroom practice. Even better, since I have read Vygotsky, I could understand better of the concepts Barnes mentioned in the chapter. I can now definitely start to see some benefits of reading difficult-to-digest theoretical books like Vygotsky. :)
Next, I went on to Chapter 4, The Value of Exploratory Talk. It was the first time I read this chapter and could feel a great amount of overlaps between ideas of the original ‘exploratory talk’ and Mercer and Dawes’ extended version of it. More importantly, reading this chapter, I reflected on my own experiences as a teacher and learner in Thai schools and found that teachers (myself included of course) tremendously miss to offer learning opportunities for students in classroom without being aware of it. I have learned so much about my teaching and learning and am also excited to go back to explore what happens in classroom right now.
To balance out the life, P’Gluay and I went out on a run specially for a bicycle hunt. P’Gluay found a second hand folding bicycle on Facebook priced at 75 pounds and it was in a brilliant condition. There was one condition though — there were a lot of people interested in it and the owner was about to leave his house in 1.30 hours. So the only way we could think of at the moment was trying to run there as soon as possible. There was a plan B that we needed to understand if the bicycle was gone by the time we reached there. Luckily, we were the first one who showed up and got the bicycle for 70 pounds. YES!
Afternoon was filled with a nap, some reading and some internet browsing. At least it got much better than yesterday.
Self-evaluation on time and life management on this: 7.5/10
Research Related Notes:
- I definitely need to get more reading done before the supervision meeting.
- Let’s stay focused!
