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...