Georgina Condos has been very much enjoying a prac session at Willoughby Public School. For eight weeks on Tuesdays and Fridays, she has been assisting a Year 2 class and their teacher.
Willoughby Public is a really big school, with more than a thousand children. They don t pause or meditate, and the children mostly live locally, so it’s quite different to John Colet.
At the moment I m taking small group tasks with some of the students, but in a few weeks I ll be planning lessons and actually taking whole lessons myself.
Georgina is half way through her four year Bachelor of Primary Education at the Australian Catholic University in North Sydney. Practical sessions are a chance to put into practice what’s been covered in lectures: how to develop lesson plans, how to get and keep a classes attention, and classroom management.
The good thing [about doing your teaching degree at ACU] is that you do pracs a lot earlier than you would do, say, at Sydney University. So there’s no chance of getting to 4th year and finding out that you don t like teaching…
Last year, she had a prac placement at a primary school in Paddington, but she says her decision to become a teacher was cemented much earlier…
I worked with Mrs Tefay on my Gap year in 2011, with her Lower First class, and I really loved it. And then I had three months travelling, which I also loved!
Georgina went to JCS between 1998 and 2004, and had Mrs Kearney the whole way through. She went on the Monte St Angelo College where she did all rounder subjects like Biology, Maths and Ancient History for HSC in 2010.
Nobody else had done any Shakespeare at all when we did it in Year 7, so that was definitely a benefit of going to John Colet. Also you gain a network of people and friends in your life and lots of opportunities come from that. Like meditation, you can feel the benefits if you do it for five minutes, you re much better off afterwards. I still meditate often, but not religiously.
Georgina currently works part time at John Colet School in the library, helping Mrs Hanson with bar-coding all the library books and putting all the books on to the computer system after the school fire.
She has a younger sister Sophia and younger brother Alex, all graduates of JCS.
