Teaching

Teaching is an interesting activity isn't it. There are good days and bad. I don't know if this one is good or bad. Something I was reading the other day was talking about sharing your approach to teaching. There are a lot of different approaches and it is important to make yours explicit. I wish I could remember what I was reading. I had two students come in and one of them said that half of my class is really happy with how things are going and half if frustrated. I can kind of sense this in class sometimes. I noticed in that some students want me to tell them exactly what to do. Some students feel very focused on the grade. I guess I haven't made me approach explicit. I think I did a better job in high school, although it is always difficult to teach a class for the first time. If you do all of the work and do it well, you get an A. Don't worry about the grade because then you are missing the point. So, how do I tell them the story of my approach. I used to worry about grading all of the time, and then I would sit down with a student who got a C (and I felt bad that they got a C), and he or she would say, "Gosh, thank goodness I got a C. That's all I really wanted." Or, I started noticing that before I added grades I could kind of "tell" what grade people would have.

I think I'm going to have them create a schedule for me. What do I want turned in? Unit plan. discovery notebook with everything, inquiry paper,

a couple of things I will ask for--a reflection on the lessons, a mid-semester reflection, a self-evaluation, a reflection on their reading autobiography.