Field-Experience Lesson

Well since it has been over a week since I did my lesson at Nixa and I wrote a paper about it and was mad that I did this before realizing that all we had to do was post - I finally motivated myself to post on here.

My lesson was over the subject of satire so I wanted to give my students a variety examples of what satire is. I started my lesson with having them write down their ideas of what a typical fairy tale entails, and I introduced them to the movie Shrek to show them how it challenges the ideas of what consists of a fairy tale. Then I moved into political cartoons and we answered the questions: What does it say? What does it mean? What does it matter? and we explored how we could see satire in the cartoon. My final aspect of the lesson was introducing a piece of writing that contained satire.

I really enjoyed this lesson and I felt really good about it. My students were really well behaved and they seemed interested in most everything that we were discussing. There are, of course, things that I could change to improve my lesson. I think that using Shrek was a great idea because it got them into the lesson but when we reached the political cartoon they were just answering my questions and they didn't seem as interested in it as I thought they would be. I don't know if it was the topic of the cartoon (which was school shootings) or something else, but I definitely feel that I could have gotten more out of them. However, the piece of writing that contained satire and that we read aloud was really exciting. Basically the woman was using satire and saying that all the races should be segregated to end racism (obviously, her message was that to end racism we should all be integrated and embrace multi-culturalism). During the reading of the article and directly after the reading, there was so much good tension! Everybody had something to say about it and it really got them talking. I would have loved to incorporate the Socratic Seminar so that they could be able to discuss the article. Some were having difficultly seeing how the writer was being satirical so I was quick to point out some language that she used to reveal to us that she was using satire to get a greater message across.

I could really go on forever about this lesson. I was pleased with how it went but I definitely see ways that I could have improved. I have to say, though, that at the end of the lesson I was still uneasy if they really understood satire. I had them fill out exit passes (asking them for their own definition of satire and something they learned abou it) and those really confirmed for me that they did grasp what I wanted them to get from my lesson. I think that this teaching experience gave me so much more confidence in who I want to be as a teacher and just in my lesson planning - I really gained a lot of lessons from it and I wish that I could have just taken over that class for the rest of the unit. We were going somewhere that day.