Thursday, October 30, 2014

The Big Day

So you know when you have that big day planned out? You've been planning, Pintresting for days, planning, searching for that right dress, planning, practicing in front of the mirror, researching, reading, theorizing...wait what did you think I was talking about?

...

Oh, no sweetie. I'm talking about teaching your first lesson! Mine was yesterday. Kind of.

So I guess you could count the one time last semester my teacher got me up and in front of the classroom to teach what a thesis is. Buuut it was a disaster, including the electricity going down in the whole school, not knowing what KTIP lesson plan even looked like, not preparing for the technology I was going to use, getting one of the examples of a thesis wrong myself, and the fact that I had no idea this was actually a review, for the students instead of their first time working with it. So I don't count that time. In fact, I don't even like to speak about it.

Last week my teacher mentioned that I could teach a lesson on Tuesday about ten characteristics of epic poetry and have students find examples of them in Paradise Lost. Stoked. I went home, studied the text, met with my professor, brainstormed some good ideas, filled out my KTIP chart, and was ready to go. Despite my last ordeal being such a disast--oh wait, we're not talking about that--I was not nervous, even excited to get in front of the classroom. So what the lesson had to be pushed back a day? The class was finishing up some writing work (which I also have to write about at some point) on Tuesday. A key part of teaching is being flexible. So there I was Wednesday morning ready to go.

Let's be real. Unless someone reads epics for fun or just loves Puritan culture, Paradise Lost is not the juiciest piece of literature to read. At the end of the day though you gotta do what you gotta do. So here is a catalogue of the events that happened.
The bell rang.

Announcements came on.
Class began.

The lesson started with a bell ringer (written on the board & explained) to refresh the students' memory of what the ten characteristics of epics were. Four minutes in the students were finishing up their answers so I asked them to start sharing what they came up with. Unsurprisingly for a class of unenthusiastic seniors at 8:00 in the morning the list was slim. However with some prompting and hints they were able to recall the whole list. Some even named additional characteristics they hadn't been asked to memorize. I then split them into groups of four to work on guided notes. The purpose of the notes was to have the students find examples of the characteristics from the text and then identify a real life example of the characteristic. I gave an example and sent them to work.

I walked around the class helping students as they needed it. Mainly this consisted of helping them find real life examples of the text, which seemed to be very challenging for the students and even the clinical teacher had problems with. I feel like my advice helped a lot of students, although occasionally I left a thoughtful face behind to brainstorm ideas. The goal was for students to remember these characteristics and see how they can be applicable to real life, but in hindsight it was perhaps a little two challenging for them to put that in perspective.

Towards the end of class everyone shared their notes and quotes. Unfortunately I ran out of time to complete all quotes and life-examples as I "taught into the bell," as the teacher put it, to finish up the most challenging ones. My feedback was mainly a positive one, with just a tip to not give that level of difficulty material to the students. In fact it was positive enough for her to even ask me to...
be continued...

Thursday, October 16, 2014

Moving On

From my several week hiatus of sharing some information and notes I have observed from school, I thought I would start with my most recent visit: this morning. I suppose what I gathered from today's experience was dealing with the population of teenagers. So skip the part of the morning where I woke up late, couldn't find the right shoes, and had to get my car jump started because my battery was dead. I came in to the classroom in the middle of the senior English class taking their final on MacBeth. The final was in depth, and large, a fact the entire class made vocal to the same old tune of the teenage whine. Although this may seem harsh to the general class, my teacher later told me they simply do not know how to take finals. Four years ago, as a general student myself, I would have resented this type of teacher, but hindsight is 20/20. I wish I had teachers that slammed me with in depth exams that made me show thorough knowledge of literature we had read. Not only would it have prepared me for exams in college, it would have made me remember literature better. Let's face it. Not every student wants to go on to college. There is still a lot to be learned from literature about life and the world.

Senior seminar was canceled, in planning I began looking at Frankenstein because they are moving on to a Romantic unit in a few weeks. I found out that these students still do portfolios, although I'm not sure to what level, so next week will be geared toward writing. Then they move on to a Puritan unit, before finishing off the semester with Romanticism. I have hope that I will get to teach a lesson with the Puritan unit so to the "Loss of Paradise," I turn to for that!

I watched a beginning Theatre class rehearse a parody of "Maceth." As my profile states I am a part time Theatre teacher to small children, some of whom also come to the acting school with no theatre experience. Thus I made sure to be as supportive as possible, although I could not help but also note the same un-enthusiasm as the first class. As a whole, the students did not want to be there.

I also wanted to comment on the restricted AP class. The assignment was for the students to find a scholarly article backing up a theory that Shakespeare was actually someone else from the Elizabethan time (like Francis Bacon, Edward De Vere,& Christopher Marlowe). They went to the computer lab, I got my iPad ready to help research, and Ebscohost was down. It could have been the rain. It could be the stress. But the class seemed to be ruined. Some students were panicking, a few students tried search engines, but for the most part they gave up. Then, of course, it was picture day and so that took some time away from their research too.

I know, I know. This is what school is sometimes. But the pressure to make every moment in school as productive as possible towards the higher goal of giving the gift of education has been ground in me the past three years can really change a person. I watched my teacher supervisor's reaction. She stayed calm, down to earth, and just rolled with the punches. Sure, her classes had a less-than-enthusiastic students, but she always stayed focused on moving forward. On top of that the students never backlashed when she tried to help each student, kept the play going, even when student broke character to go take a picture, and she told them to stop whining about their assignments. My lesson for today was to accept the times when the other million things that happen at school happen to accept, and move on.

That Inconvenient Thing Called...

Life. Because I believe in consistent blogging and writing I thought I should layout my excuses of why I have not updated since my first day in the school. I had gone another day to observe, only to take a week off because the school had fall break. I came back after that for a couple days to work in the school and then the teacher was absent from the school on a field trip. Then I got my wisdom teeth taken out and had dry sockets that kept me home (when trust me I would have had rather been at school and pain-free). Throw in another day the seniors were testing and I have really only been to school less than a handful of time since the beginning. But I have some interesting observations and applied learning from my clinical work. Lots of ideas. Lots to look forward to!