teaching as a student as a teacher

The last couple of weeks we got to spend on teaching a lesson was a lot of fun. It was really neat for me to see the different approaches everyone took on teaching story telling. None of the lessons were the same. It made me think a lot about how differently the same subject can be taught. It emphasized for me how important coming together as a staff and collaborating on how to best teach a unit is.

As far as taking on the role of being a teacher as a student, it was a good experience, but I'm also not sure if it was a realistic representation of how I would interact with students in a real classroom setting. Since I feel very comfortable with the students that are in our class, I felt as if I were a peer giving a presentation rather than a teacher teaching a class. I think this is partially because I know all of the students in our class are there to learn, and I didn't have to focus on teaching to a range of different abilities or anything. Everyone was polite, engaged and respectful.

Being a student during all of these lessons was also a lot of fun. It was really cool to see what people decided to focus on in the lessons, and how they went about keeping the class engaged to teach what they needed to teach. I enjoyed all of the activities that we did. Every group was great at creating in class activities that were fun and focused. It made for a week worth of really fun stuff!

Writing papers and horseback riding

I tried really hard to think of something in the classroom setting that I didn't find to be an arduous task and kind of had to rack my brain to come up with something, but I think I was just approacing it incorrectly. I think that writing papers that are based on a fairly open prompt is an activity that, though often not as fun as watching "How I Met Your Mother" marathons, allows me to excercise my intellectual muscles while still thinking outside of the box. I'm not necessarily passionate about writing papers, but as far as academia is concerned, I would much rather be able to write an argumentative paper where greatness is open to interpretation than take a test where there is one correct and one incorrect answer.

Thinking of things that have a balance of freedom and form outside of the school setting was much easier. The one activity that naturally came to mind was playing horse polo. The rules of the game are set so that the safety of the horse and rider are always first priority. The movement of the game is quick, competative, and elegant. As a rider, I have the freedom to make decisions to best work together with my horse and my two teammates to reach our goal, but following the rules and the form that are set by the game makes my playing more effective.

Getting a detrimentally late start...

I think that my most recent positive class experience is the best place to start for a reflective blog.  I took a class last semester that I think I will remember more than any other class I will ever take in college.  I don't think it was just the professor that made the class so exceptional, but he certainly played a massive role in it. 

The class had been taught by the same professor for a good number of years, and he had developed the curriculum so well that, even when things didn't go as planned, it seemed as if he was running it seamlessly. It was a class designed to allow the professor to oversee and mediate in class discussions and design lesson plans based on what the students discussed and taught to eachother.

He didn't follow the Goals to evaluation schema, per se, but he made it very clear that he didn't want to be the one talking all of the time. Because the class was a literature class, it was important to hear from all of the students and get a classwide discussion going. Instead of standing up at the front of the class asking students questions and making them respond to them, the professor sat intermingled in the class, helped groups of students develop a lesson plan for a certain book, and contributed to the conversation just as the rest of the class did as the small group of students he had met with earlier initiated the book discussions.

Not only did I retain what I would consider to be above average amounts of information, but I made more friends in that class and felt more comfortable in that environment than I have in any class I've been in since elementary school! Overall, there wasn't one bad thing I could think to say about that class. It was just all around wonderful.