I love the idea of being able to bring in other curriculum elements into my lessons. My sweeping statement for teaching is that we are educating the youth of today to ready them for the outside world. So, if this is the case, then it makes absolute sense to be covering more than one KLA when planning and teaching lessons.
My discipline areas for study are Home Economics/Hospitality and Mathematics and to me nothing screams more REAL life than Home Economics. I have had a number of comments from peers regarding the 'odd' mix of my disciplines but I have much pleasure in telling them of the opportunities that I have had to bring Maths into my Home Economics lessons. Pie graphs, tables, conversions, chemical compositions and numerical variation are all Maths based tools that I have used in the Home Ec classroom. Whether we are measuring out our ingredients, measuring the required material or working out how many grams of carbohydrates we should have in our diet, we are using Maths. The one thing I need to remind myself of is the fact that it is okay to spend time on other areas within the curriculum. Too often, we get caught up on getting through the content of the lesson and don't stop to consider whether the class understood how or why we are doing things. If it takes 20 minutes to go through how to work out what 60% means, then is that such a bad thing? I make assumptions that the students will have covered these things in their Maths lessons (and they probably have) but did they actually understand it? I have also experienced this with relation to senior subjects where I have assumed that by year 12 they would well and truly know how to structure an essay. Unfortunately, this is not the case and many students have needed to be guided through the genre before they can begin the actual assessment. So, although this may not have been factored into lessons - it is a very necessary skill that needs to be taught. I guess this is why some lessons just do not go to plan - we need to be flexible when planning so that we allow for situations such as this.
One of the teachers at my last prac school told me that he believed we were all just 'Teachers' - not a Maths teacher, science teacher etc....a 'Teacher' - someone who has the ability to guide students' learning. I constantly worry about my lack of content when I enter the classrooms and have been reassured by many teachers not to worry - that the content will come.
Your mentor teachers are right Tonita. Our focus appears to be so strongly on content, and in reality we will always know more than the 12/13 year old children we teach. My experience when starting teaching was working for hours trying to learn the content. But then finding that it was the delivery that was important, the ways of explaining, the pedagogy. But it is absolutely normal to be concerned about the content until you develop confidence.
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