Ok then...

So here goes a little reflection about by lesson at Central not too long ago. I never really did this, so take my hand, and let's see what happens...

My lesson at Central High School was with an English III class (mostly Juniors) on the Great Gatsby. The goal of the lesson was to introduce Gatsby and get started with the beginning of the text. The first thing I did was introduce the text itself, telling them what we would be reading, and why we would be reading it. I introduced it as a book about lying, getting ahead in life, being accepted, and social classes. The students grabbed onto the idea about social classes rather quickly, so I ran with that for a bit.

The next thing I did was give them a set of anticipatory questions to get them thinking about the text. I first gave them the questions to look at individually, and then we got into small groups and they discussed their opinions (agree or disagree, and why). Lastly, I let them discuss the quetions as a class and I facilitated the discussion. I felt like they really enjoyed this part of the lesson best, although I had a little trouble keeping them only going one at a time, at least that meant they all cared about the questions and wanted to discuss their opinions.

Then we did vocab. I am not a big fan of vocab, but teacher wanted me to incorporate it, so I did. I gave them a "I've know this/I've seen this/I've never seen this" vocab worksheet, and they went over it in small groups. I then gave them dictionaries to look over the ones that they couldn't come to a consensus about, and last we went over them in class and they said aloud what they found. This, to me, was the most boring part of the lesson. I do not know a better way to do vocab though.

The last thing we did was to get into the text. I read the first 10 pages of the text before the class was let out and the extremely annoying bell rang. Reading aloud to the class seemed like an issue to me because I was afraid they would act up while I was busy reading, but luckily they were very respectful and listened.

The class closed with a "write something you learned" writing assignment for the last couple of minutes, and then they left. By the way, I didn't tell them it was my last day (goodbyes are stupid), so apparently that surprised some of them.

All in all I felt like my transitions from one part of the class to the next was the main thing I need to work on. I was fairly confident (as I should be because I'm pretty great), and I was quite well prepared, but the passing out of papers, etc., made it difficult to not lose them in the process.

Ok then.