KYSD 2007

The Know Your School Day 2007 was a great success to us UPians. The Know Your School Day is an annual activity in the UP High School in Cebu where the students can experience how it feels to be a teacher, a clerk, a principal, assistant principal, and others.

This school year, I did not apply for any position in the Know Your School Day activity. I just sat down on my chair doing the casual thing as a student. As a student, I must listen to our teacher’s discussions. There were times that my eyelids are drooping down but I managed to be awake. I listened quite well because a student lecturing his or her classmates does not happen everyday. It happens only once or twice in a year and it only happens during Know Your School Day. If there were questions regarding our lessons, we can question our student teacher in a more casual way. For me, it was more or less the same feeling because I was still a student not like my other classmates that had a “change” from a student to a teacher. But I also know how it feels like to be standing in front of the class lecturing classmates.

When I was a junior student, I was a student teacher in trigonometry. I also experienced to be a student teacher in geometry when I was a sophomore. Using my experiences as my bases, I can say that the Know Your School Day activity is beneficial to us students who act as teachers. It enables us (the student teachers) to practice responsibility. Having been a student teacher, I realized that being a teacher is not so easy. You feel the pressure on you. You must not just recite some formulas and equations but you must also see to it that the students will get to understand what you are saying. You need to explain and elaborate some points that may seem hard to be understood by your students. When I was a student teacher, I realized that teaching is one of the best professions. It is one of the best in the sense that in teaching, you give what you have, and you share what you have. You cannot give something to someone if you do not have that something in the first place. Teaching also taught me on how to be patient and considerate. It taught me patience because since unnecessary noise cannot be avoided during our classes, I must be patient in handling their behavior. It taught me how to be considerate because when we checked our seat works, most of the errors of my students (my classmates) were just on rounding off numbers (I taught on Geometry and Trigonometry subjects). After teaching, I told myself that teaching is not an easy thing to do.

I am so thankful to the one who proposed this activity. We were given a chance to cultivate our being responsible. It also made us students understand the things the teachers do to us for the betterment of ourselves.