another out of body experience

Last night I watched tape of my second day of team teaching, when I taught circles, my second day of conic sections, to Ms. Cornelius' class. While it is always painful to listen to recordings of my own voice, there were plenty of points for improvement. This, I felt before watching it, was my best lesson of the week. I'm really glad I don't have to watch the other ones. Watching the little running clock in the corner was especially instructive. The DoNow problems took up much too much of my class time. I started my set at 14:08. It's no wonder, then, that I didn't have time for my closure, or that I looked a little awkward leaning against the desk after I had made my rounds two or three times through the desks. There were two problems, both dealing with parabolas, which we had covered the day before, and I wanted to make sure that they really understood the material, but it took forever. I think maybe a better option would be to have the DoNow problem relate to more basic skills that we will be using in the lesson that day - like I did distance formula questions the first day, and factoring before we did equations in non-standard form.

I need to give more clear instructions about expectations. The "students" had created double cones on Monday, to help them visualize how it needs to be dissected, but I need to have them put the cones under their desks, or somewhere, so that they aren't being twirled around in class, the same way Hunter, after giving out a wordsearch to those who finished his quiz early, told us all"Now, take your wordsearches and put them under your desk." Those are the kind of clear instructions I ought to adopt. I also need to work on my body language or posture, or something, so that I don't look like such a goofy dude up there. Maybe it's just that I was watching myself, and so of course looked goofy, but I tend to believe that I really look pretty goofy up there. I'll work on that.

I'm not very sure about my general formula of a lesson. This lesson, like all the other lessons I taught, all summer, has involved me lecturing a little, doing an example on the board, bringing students or a student to the board to do an example. But when one student is at the board doing an example, or anything really, it looks, on tape, like dead time for the rest of the class, even though I don't recall it feeling that way in person (except one time, when the student doing the work on the board didn't have a clue about what to do). Ms. Smith had a good idea relating to this problem, in which I check the students' work before I choose a student to go to the board. But what to do with the rest of them, I'm not really sure. Maybe assign to problems, have everyone working on them, and when walking through, snag a student who did the first one correctly or with an especially common, illustrative mistake and send him or her to the board to write the problem up there while everyone else finished the second, and then have the student explain his or her work to everyone (which should only take half as long once they've gotten everything written on the board), while the other students check the work on the board, and make sure it matches their answer and the steps they took.

Relating to this problem, I have only taught classes of 6-8 students, and so all my ideas about lesson plans and classroom management will be in need of severe tune-ups once I have kids in front of me, one of which is sick, two of which are sleeping, one who wants to answer every questions and a half dozen who won't ever answer. One thing summer school should do, although I forgot to write it on the evaluation, is force teachers who have less then 15 students to at least one lesson to a class with more than 20. Then, I'd know what it felt like, at least for forty minutes.

The example about Zidane and the headbutt worked well, in terms of holding the interest of the students. Unfortunately, I only had a minute for it. The funniest part of the lesson might have been my face, just before the tape cut out, when I heard Ms. Cornelius say "Ok, that's the bell." I was quite visibly shocked. I need to get a clock, because I look especially goofy when I am looking at my watch. A digital watch might help too, because, even though I am 22 and a graduate student, it still takes me a few seconds longer than it should to read an analog one. The timer that Ms. Cornelius lent me the next day worked especially well. I rushed my third lesson to try to cram in a lot of material and a closure, and looked at the timer on the desk every other minute, Ms. Cox remarked that even though I wasn't looking at the clock or my watch, it felt rushed. While the rushed part was certainly a valid criticism, the fact that she mentioned that I wasn't looking at a watch or clock meant the timer did its job very inconspicuously.

Despite all the problems that jumped out at me from the lesson, perhaps the most startling thing was that I actually looked like a teacher. I guess that is a good thing, since in 23 days I'll be in charge of 60 - 80 kids, for 94 minutes each, everyday. So I'm glad that I'm finally starting to look the part.