Classroom Observation

Well the first thing that I want to talk about is the fact that I could never be a Jr. High School teacher. Even the thought of having to teach these kids scares me, and not many things scare me very much. This one does. It takes an unnatural amount of patience to deal with all of the classroom issues, and do it well. I fear for the lives of the children… Aside from that I thought it was very helpful. I kept a close eye on Reilly once I saw how difficult the kids were being. He held himself very well and didn’t let anything upset him. He took it all in stride, and was great to the kids. The funniest thing is that it’s probably a tame classroom and I’m just not used to that sort of chaos anymore. Anyway, back to what I learned:

One of the things I thought Reilly was really good at was bringing an energy to the classroom that grabbed the student’s attention, but he didn’t let it get out of hand. He started out with a question on the board and gave the students a few minutes at the start of class to think about it and write down their answer. The question was,  “What would you ask your hero if he/she was accused of cheating?” I participated in the activity and wrote down my answer. Then, using a few video clips, he showed the class what happened with Lance Armstrong. They were all shocked at the scandal, and he used his interview with Oprah to demonstrate the use of Yes/No questions vs open ended questions. It was pretty great actually. It kept the kids involved and interested, and as long as the video was working they were all pretty quiet. One of the things that I also thought was pretty great was that after thanksgiving break they would be choosing a topic of their choice to research and basically do what we did. Since it’s an English class, it’ll be in the form of an argument paper, but nonetheless it’s quite similar. I just hope they do something that’s a little more media related so that our lesson is applicable, helpful, and gives them some ideas of what they can do.

As Mack, Sammi, and I drove home we all brainstormed on how we can teach this class in the best way possible using Mack’s topic. We figure a bunch of Jr. High kids wouldn’t be all that stoked on the topics of feminism or corporate corruption. We could probably make it more interesting based on our approach, but we figure every kid loves movies, and using the movies they’ve seen to show them how the antagonist of a film is treated will instantly grab their attention. A few ideas we came up were the following:

·      Ask them what their favorite movies are and have them write them on the board.

·      Ask them what happens to the antagonist of those films.

·      Ask if they think the antagonist deserved what he got.

·      Ask if that’s how they treat people that offend them.

·      Ask them how the endings could be changed to make it nicer to the “bad guy.”

I’m pretty excited about teaching. There are multiple things that I’m nervous about, but I think ultimately it will be pretty great!