Three Lessons To Be Learned

This week I taught my second lesson at the high school this time about the Korean War. I didn’t feel as confident on this topic as I had on the previous one. I also was trying to limit myself to only thirty minutes and of course that didn’t work. I went on for about forty minutes or so. I couldn’t think up an activity for the students for this particular topic so unfortunately it was more along the lines of a lecture. I attempted to turn it into a discussion but it's hard when you really don’t know what they’ve already covered. There's a standard from NC about knowing your content that I always pride myself on because this standard for me has never been hard to achieve. But this last lesson hit me at the one area I’m weak in because I only have a simple understanding and knowledge of the Korean War. But the next lesson will be even harder because I’ll be teaching on the culture of the 60’s. Not just an area I don’t have much academic knowledge of but also my least favorite decade in American history. So far I think that there is a lesson to be learned. From my first lesson I need to restrain myself and determine what most important that students understand. From my second lesson I need to know all my content thoroughly. And from my third I need to be able to teach and treat with equal importance my least favorite subject and my favorite subject.

Sherlock

This week we had someone from one of the schools in North Carolina come by and teach us about data collection. She was nice enough and pretty laid back I did learn about the different data that we will collect or if we don’t someone else will, and that's probably not a good thing. This all has to do with the standard that states “the work of the teacher results in acceptable, measurable progress for students based on established performance expectations using appropriate data to demonstrate growth.” I learned more about just how much almost anything and everything can come back and bite us in the butt if we are not always on our toes. I’ve learned what kind of data we will need to collect and what they say, I’ve learned the different forms of assessments, but I have yet to learn what I’m supposed to do with this. Well you just make changes and implement more effective policies to increase student understanding. Well that's great how am I supposed to do that Sherlock? It's great to have all this data at your fingertips but it doesn’t do anyone any good if we don’t know what to do with it.

Scire quod sciendum

This week I finally presented my first lesson plan at the high school, one down two to go. The lesson plan went alright I suppose, it didn't go exactly as I had planned. The lesson plan was more lecture based than I would have liked it to be. With this particular topic I had to teach, the Great Depression and New Deal, it’s incredibly hard to do anything but lecture. I asked for advice and tips from my clinical educator who said that "sometimes you just have to lecture." Not the most comforting advice. I'm glad she thought I did well but she’s not the one who will be grading me on my performance. Despite this I was able to put some stuff into my lesson that got the students engaged and talking about the content because of how "crazy" some of the stuff I was saying was. Which was great, as it related to the particular topic I was teaching on, I wasn't expecting the reaction I got but this was a great surprise. It was a demonstration of the relation of government projects and government jobs to the increase from 24% to 67% to 87% and finally 94% income tax by having them take the percent from a dollar in nickels. Their response showed me they had more understanding of economics than many high schoolers I've met. It provoked an interesting discussion that got EVERYONES attention. I was able to connect it to the whole lesson to show that there was a connection to what I was teaching to what I had them doing. I think it also made what I was teaching clearer to them.



I attempted to make the lesson engaging and interesting to the students which is hard to do with such a Depressing topic. Yeah I know that was a really bad joke. But there is a standard I found that I've always tried to incorporate into my lessons and is probably one of the few standards I feel is not such a waste of time. By that I mean it is important and is not so overly optimistic, it is do-able and relevant to what we are supposed to do as teachers. It is realistic and not the whole "how we'd like the lessons to be" or "how we like class to go" types that stress us out about how we're supposed to incorporate all of this. "Teachers make the content they teach engaging, relevant, and meaningful to students' lives" I tried this in my last lesson that I presented to our class; in fact it was the whole basis of my lesson. If any of you have read by past blogs you know that this standard is the one that I treat as a personal standard and the whole reason I got into this in the first place.

NIKE

Well I finally gave my presentation this week and unlike last time I wasn't so stressed out about presenting it. I feel like the 6 point lesson plan template that Dr. Clark gave us to fill out and put almost word for word what we were going to say really hinders many people from doing better. There's an almost "I have to stick to the plan and can't deviate from it" mentality, at least it is with me. I scrapped my original plan and came up with a different lesson and only took me thirty minutes to put together. Instead of trying to put together an intricate lesson that revolved around students debating with each other I went with an entire lesson based solely on establishing relevancy revolving around discussion. I decided to stick with the Roman Republic but I was also teaching about US history and US government to connect it to other subjects and build a foundation of understanding so they will know something going into those classes the following semester. Overall the lesson went according to plan I just didn't get to cover all of it so it felt lacking in some areas. But the great thing was that the students were way more involved in the discussion than I originally though they would be which I think made the lesson better. Now there's a NC standard that says something along the lines of "Teachers make the content they teach engaging, relevant, and meaningful to students’ lives." And no I didn't memorize that, I had to go fishing on their site to find a standard that was relevant to this. But I believe that, at least to some extent, I achieved this. And honestly this lesson was fun to teach I only wish I had more time to teach it because I hadn't even got to the REALLY good stuff yet.

Plan B

This week has been quite a trip with everything that's been going on the projects, papers, quizzes, and tests. But working on my lesson plan for this week was a breeze and didn’t take me long to put together. It had everything in it that would make a great lesson but after this week I realized that I made one fatal mistake that I had not taken into consideration, students don’t always do what they’re told. And that's what happened, half of the class didn’t watch the video before class and the other half had a hard time understanding it, that was my own fault I’ll admit. But while I was fishin’ around on the NC Standards site trying to find one that relates to this situation and I guess that would be to know your content. I am a bit paranoid at times and sometimes that comes in handy because I had a feeling just before class that most people didn’t watch it and that my lesson would have to be scraped. But where this standard applies, at least to my understanding, is just a few hours before class I came up with a plan B just in case. Plan B was related to my first lesson but had a lot of changes to take into consideration that students didn’t know the content. Not sure if there is a standard relating to this but I think it would be a good one and that is always be prepared for the worst case scenario. But I knew my stuff well enough to create a whole new lesson to adapt to the current situation. The more I reflect on the new lesson the more I see some more flaws in my original that I had not seen before. But I think it offered a good experience that we need to be ready for anything and always have a plan B and be able to adapt to the new circumstances.

Sisyphus...

Today's class really went by fast, now I know a lot of people say that and don't mean it but seriously where on earth did the time go? I felt like we were only in there for thirty minutes or so. Not sure if that's because I was focused and didn’t notice the time or I have poor time management skills. Probably a bit of both.

Today we were working on creating an infographic which until today I’d never heard of. But it required that we reflected/assess and self evaluate where we are. This is a key part of our job as teachers in assessing, reflecting, and evaluating ourselves; hence why it is one of the NC standards. We have to be able to do this and see where we can improve as teachers; to get students engaged in the learning process, enhance and transform learning, establishing relevancy, and integrating literacy. Just listing all of these things that we have to consider is stressing me out. I can’t help but feel that there is this almost “your best will never be enough” feeling that makes me a little depressed and stressed in constantly trying to do better knowing you will have to be doing this regularly. Where you think “yes, this time I’ve finally done it. There’s nothing more to improve on.” but it never is and we have to continually look for ways to improve. It is like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the mountain.

It's not the improving thing that stresses me out but it the feeling of trying to get students engaged in the learning process, enhance and transform learning, establish relevancy, while also planning lessons (most likely for several subjects), creating tests, coming up with projects, deal with the principal and angry parents, jungle your own personal life, and fight the urge to just take the easy way out and lecture. I guess it’s the trying to get everything right even though you never will that is getting me.

So Close Yet So Far Away

I don’t know about the rest of you but I feel like this semester has really started to fly by with the snow break and one week of classes cancelled. I feel like I should be farther along in the learning process but I’m not. I don’t know how to explain it.
    Well anyways, I got to observe my clinical experience placement’s class and it was slightly different than I thought it would be. The day I came to observe was the day when only twenty five or so minutes was spent teaching the rest of the time the students were quietly working on an in class project. So I didn’t get to observe a whole lot about what to expect when I have to teach a lesson. The good news was that it gave me almost an hour to ask the teacher a bunch of questions about her class. Then I learned that I may be in way deeper than I originally thought. My teacher teaches four other subjects and depending on what day and time I choose I may be teaching anything from US government, world history, US history, to AP Euro. If this project didn’t count for as much as it does this wouldn’t worry me at all because I’m pretty well grounded in each area. Either way this will definitely prove to be interesting.
    Despite this, I think this will prove to be an interesting lesson seeing as if/when I get a job teaching I will mostly likely have to teach three or four different subjects. I’m a little nervous and a bit excited, kinda strange but that's the best way I can put it. I am looking forward to having to give a lesson to our class though. I spent a lot of time working on this one and I looked back on my last experience in 250 and took all that I had learned into consideration. Having to keep a blog like we did in 250 was very beneficial so I could read my own thoughts from back then. Not joking, these blogs really do come in handy when going back over what we’ve covered in the semester or in my case last semester. So word from the wise, put some effort into these blogs trust me it comes in handy later.
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