On My Own

Yesterday was an exciting but exhausting day for me. After taking a long AP Calculus test yesterday morning, I rushed back to St. Barnabas for the remaining two class periods as Miss Brennan (my advisor) was coming to visit me on project. When I arrived, I had a few minutes to get organized, set up before the eighth graders came back from lunch and talk with Miss Brennan. It was nice to see a familiar face!

This was the first day that I planned a class by myself, which was an entirely new experience for me since I’m usually the one sitting in a seat and not standing up in front of a class for a full class period. Also, in my week and a half at St. Barnabas, I usually follow what Mrs. Muir has planned when she has me teach some of her classes. I have to admit that planning and preparing a lesson for a class takes a lot more time than I thought. Not only did I have to make sure that I covered and included all of the information that the students needed to learn, but I also had to make sure that there was enough material to cover the full forty minutes. I was given the task of teaching the eighth grade classes about the last battles/events of the Civil War and its conclusion. For this topic, I planned a review game on what the students had learned about the Civil war so far for the first fifteen minutes or so of class. I brought candy with me for anyone who answered a question, which surely increased participation. Then, I passed out an outline of the notes (it had blanks in its to make it easier to follow along) the students were going to take that day on a Prezi I created about the end of the Civil War. A lot of them had never seen a Prezi before so I had many positive reactions since they though it was something “cool.”

Each of the classes got through all of the material that was planned for that class, which was a plus. I don’t know how to adequately describe what it was like being able to teach my own lesson other than with the frequent middle schooler adjective, “cool.”