Jaweria Saleem
A classroom at home. For two small learners.
Building a classroom at home for two small learners.
- Now
- Teaching her two sons, aged six and four, at home
- Programme
- PgCTL, a current learner at the time of recording
- Next
- Hopes for a post at a school, teaching more children
Jaweria's six-year-old son did well at school until classes moved online; he stopped responding, so she brought him home. Studying while teaching him and his younger brother, she rebuilt their days around hands-on learning and structured lessons, and both grew more confident.
Five stars from a pupil.
Near the end of her video, Jaweria Saleem asks one of her sons to rate her as a teacher, and talks him through the scale. “Five means good. Four means a little good. Three means OK. Two means not good. One means really bad.” He gives her five stars.
She was a current PgCTL learner when she recorded it, not employed, and her sons, aged six and four, were her pupils. During the pandemic year she found the older boy’s online classes “actually quite disruptive”. “He wasn’t really responding to them at all,” she says. “So for his sake, I decided to teach him at home, him and his little brother.” She found the programme shortly afterwards. She had always wanted to enter teaching formally. “It’s something that I do think that I was made for,” she says, “in terms of the amount of satisfaction that I get and the amount of joy that I get from teaching.”
Lessons that do not tire them.
She had been studying only a short time, and says she could already see the effect on her methods and her approach. It widened her view of teaching. “It’s so much more than meets the eye,” she says. At home that has meant hands-on learning, different types of modelling techniques and as much correlation with real life as possible, in all the subjects she teaches the boys. She gives it to them as a structured lesson, one “that makes them not tire very easily”. She has noticed what happens afterwards, too: “When I let them go they’re very eager to come back whenever I ask them to.”
Both boys are much more confident in their abilities, she says, and “whatever they learn, they’re just so happy to do it”.
Everything that I’ve been learning I’ve been trying to implement with them and I’ve seen a lot of growth in both of them.
Next, more children.
She is looking forward to the rest of the course and hopes to end it on a positive note. After that she hopes to “get employed at a school where I can affect and teach more children”. She knows what she wants them to take from her: that they can be optimistic, that they can be inquisitive and curious, and that they can “hopefully become lifelong learners as well”.
