The Continued

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...

Teach another lesson the next day. Taking this as a good sign, although I didn't have much time to plan a cool activity like the day before, I finished Paradise Lost. In a nutshell this lesson was not very engaging. I sat in the front of the classroom and read the rest of the portion of the epic we were reading and helped translate the language and why it was relevant. Classic fire and brimstone style: which is so not me. I could tell the students were completely bored out of their minds and in another world, where Paradise Lost and I were not invited. Note taken.

Third period rolled around, my mind still reviewing the morning's lessons, and my teacher asked me to run the rehearsal in her third period Intro to Theatre class. Since I have some experience teaching Theatre and teaching lessons off the cuff as I go along, this did not require me to sit down and plan over text like, Paradise Lost. Instead I sat and watched them perform a scene they have been working on for a couple weeks, stopping them when I saw something that could be stronger. In the art, this is called directing. In Education this could be considered scaffolding or teaching mini lessons. Regardless the portion of the class period went pretty smoothly and when my teacher came back into the Theater she took back over.

Theatre is my stronger subject. It's something I have studied intensively for a lot longer than I have intensively studied English. Of course, this does not mean that I want it to stay that way. So I'm learning and taking notes as I go. For example, instead of giving the lesson lecture style, I could have had the students read the poem together and then talk about it. I could have scaffolded the class by showing them how I read the text, then had them read it together, and then had them read it individually. I should have related it to how this information is important for them to know. I could have done a mini-leson on how to take notes as they are reading. I could have passed out guided notes for students that preferred visual guides. Last Tuesday I taught a lesson on Rime of the Ancient Mariner in a similar style. I had a Prezi set up, and an audio reading of the ballad. We would stop the reading to talk about important Romantic characteristics and what the ballad was saying, but its only a variation of how I taught my second lesson on Paradise Lost. I am teaching another lesson on Mary Shelley on Thursday so I will be sure to incorporate some of these notes with my next lesson. Until/before then!