Transitions

So Friday was a fairly major step for me on my path to teaching, since it marked the first day I am teaching two blocks (out of a total of three). I felt the day had its ups and downs, but it really wasn't until I'd finished and could reflect on it that I've been able to get a real scope of things and how they went.

In AP Lit, I taught a lesson on a poem called "The Shape of Mythic Lies." I personally love this poem, which is about the need to shake off the yoke of history/the perfection of the past and make for ourselves a worthwhile present, and the students really seemed to connect with the poem. My supervisor attended this class and had some great notes for me. He focused in that it was an extremely full lesson and that I might have wanted to tone it back a bit. I feel though that I was working backwards in building this lesson to end with a forty minute AP style essay writing, with enough scaffolding that the students felt comfortable about both the poem and the terminology they would need.

The only thing I wish I had thought to change was incorporating the poem more. I think if as a class we had gone around and used the poem itself to dissect and analyze the poetic terminology, it would have been so much better. My supervisor also told me that I needed work on transitions, moving between one activity and another. Having never researched or looked into these before, he was clearly absolutely right.

I then taught the freshman lit. class. I didn't feel as prepared for this one, but I had some idea of where I felt it needed to go. Unfortunately, I did not do a quality job explaining this to Mrs. C. I felt like in a lot of ways I let her down because of our miscommunications, and that the class didn't go as smoothly or productively as I had wanted it to.

What went well was a discussion of lynching and race. I felt that, not unsurprisingly, students who live in Vermont don't really know what lynching is about. "It's someone getting hung, right? By a mob of people?" Not quite. The act of lynching was an act of fear, designed to strip away someone's humanity and send a message of terror to anyone else that it could happen next to them. Thinking about it in that light, I wish I'd talked about the idea of terrorism, which is much closer to the students' own lives.

I think though that I really got the message across. Images of actual lynchings from the book Without Sanctuary hammered home the severity and reality of what is happening in To Kill a Mockingbird in a way that otherwise couldn't have happened.


While I feel this portion went extremely well and is something the students will bring with them long after the class period, I also feel I could have introduced the images better. I provided a minimalist amount of forewarning as I passed out the papers that we would be looking at violent and disturbing images, but I should have started talking about it prior to actually giving things out. Mrs. C really drove that home for me, and I have been kicking myself for not saying so ahead of time. I think it stemmed from the miscommunications I mentioned.

I originally wanted to pass the text around, but Mrs. C was adamantly against this because it would never make its way successfully around the room. I agreed, and she suggested copying the images. I did so with a small measure of difficulty, including a copy of one lynching photograph used as a postcard. I made copies for each student, and passed them around so that everyone could get one. Unfortunately, Mrs. C pointed out to me that I might not want students having these incredibly disturbing images and just passing them out. In hindsight, I should have made only a few copies and had them circulate through the room.

It was after this discussion had slowed down and we were moving (awkwardly, because I still don't understand transitions) into the next activity that I felt things began to break down.

I wanted students aware of a homework assignment prior to doing a chapter read around. I wanted everyone looking for specific characters, because it was going to be important for this homework. So I told them about this assignment and explained it prior to doing the reading activity. I felt like there was a stilted disconnect - the usual way things go, you discuss homework only at the end of class (if at all). So I had really mucked up the order of things.

The read around itself went well, but I felt that I could have done it better. I didn't really understand Mrs. C's participation points system until now, and so I wish I'd had a better idea of how that should look at the end of class. If I did, I might have given each student who read a +1 and students who read a particularly long section a +2. Instead I just took notes and when we ended the chapter 10 minutes early, I panicked.

After asking Mrs. C what I should do, she suggested I ask questions about the homework and, if I didn't have anything I intended to do with them, recollect the rather disturbing images I'd passed out. I suddenly realized what an enormous error I'd made. I rushed to collect these, and didn't ask the right questions while I was doing so. Because I'd made copies on single sides, the students had written on the backs and needed to take notes. I was rushed trying to sign participation forms and answer reading questions while making sure none of the copies got out of the classroom.

I felt like a complete failure during this last ten minutes, and Mrs. C seemed disappointed in how it had gone. She mentioned that I needed to work on transitions, but also needed to rush out and get her car repaired. I, still getting over my feelings of panic and fear, began jumping over her sentences and trying to think of something I could do to make myself feel more successful and helpful, like correcting quizzes or assisting with something else.

My greatest fear of teaching is going out with nothing prepared and staring down a room full of students who will ask "Well, what now?"

So it's been a long weekend and I feel like I'm in a better spot than I was Friday afternoon. I think AP went great and there were elements of the freshman class which went really well (even if there were some that didn't). Now, armed with a little bit more knowledge, I hope I've learned something out of what worked and what didn't.

So in my wider life, I made what might be a colossally bad or good decision this weekend and agreed to participate in a theater production with a friend. That goes up the first full week of my student teaching.

Now wait - wait! Hear me out! This really might be the best thing for me: I have heard from most everyone I've worked with so far that I'm still completely in my head, in the sense that I am thinking about thinking about teaching, and not living in the moment teaching. It's really completely true, so I feel the best way to help with that is to find an activity that is tangentially connected to teaching, but which draws upon a very different skill set. What I need is a different way to engage my brain on the subject of teaching and also, to have some fun.

I love acting, though I don't have much professional experience with it. However, I have had several great experiences with theater at Marlboro, my undergraduate school, and coming back for another performance feels good to me. This might be a huge mistake, and be putting too much into one time frame, but as a teacher this is also part of what I'll be experiencing and dealing with: my whole life can't just be how to teach. I need to learn to balance time, write open-ended lesson plans that feature wiggle room if we move too fast or too, and to begin the balancing act of school-time and out-of-school-time.

The fact I'm playing a Dean of the Humanities department can only help.