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.