Years of Experience

On my eighth time having SEP (School Experience Program)— which also the last SEP during the teacher education program, I was feeling confident in my ability to teach. I have done 8 SEP, I have been a tutor on my campus for 2 semesters, I have been a private tutor 3 times, and I have worked professionally as a class tutor in 3–5 classes. I think that was enough for me to understand the art of teaching. However, also on my eighth SEP, I realized that I was wrong, that I still need years of experience in teaching and learning, that there is vast room for improvement.

One day, I was making problems to be discussed by the students. My idea came from the current event in Indonesia which was a natural disaster in NTT. The main idea was to ask the students to calculate the area of different shapes of quadrilaterals. Below was how I made the problem.

I was pretty satisfied with the problem I made. Then, as always, I send the file to my mentor teacher to ask for feedback. I thought there will be just minor feedbacks from the mentor teacher, but I was wrong. The teacher came back to me and he recast the problem I made. I was fascinated by the changes he made, and that was the moment where I realized my skill in teaching needed to be sharpened. I realized that there is no shortcut to being an experienced teacher, we need to experience teaching and learn from it. Below is how my mentor teacher changed the problem I made:

He added image, he added context, he changed the situation in which students need to calculate the area, he changed the wording, he added question, he made the problem more real and make sense. Even more, he did it like it was something easy. He could see the lack in the problem that I could not see, and he was able to change it to be better. That time I think, “ah, this is how an experienced teacher's work looks like.”

The moment then made me realize that my journey to understand teaching and learning and to be a good teacher is still far away. I was struck by the truth that I am not even close — yet, but I think it is okay. In the beginning, I expected that I would be a ready-to-teach teacher by the end of my last SEP. Turns out, I became more a ready-to-learn teacher.