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.