Week One Done

 I have officially been at Central Columbia High School for a week now and we're off to a pretty solid start. I observed for a few days before I started teaching the plant science unit to two sections of Ag Science I. I'm going to take this opportunity to share a few take aways from my week.

1. The amount of time it takes students to take down notes varies greatly. Some kids finish their notes so quickly that you wonder how they possibly got it all down, while others take their time writing each word. You need to find a way to keep the faster students engaged while waiting for their peers to finish, and also make sure that the students that are taking longer are focusing and not getting distracted by things like side conversations or their cell phones.

2. Every class is different. I initially thought that teaching two sections of the same course would allow me to teach the same lesson twice, while making tiny improvements for the second one. I was wrong. The first section takes much more time to accomplish tasks, but they also seem to be more engaged. The second section accomplishes everything much quicker, so I'm either going to have to add extra material to their lesson, or move through the unit at a different pace than I am with the other section.

3. A lesson not going perfectly doesn't make it a bad lesson or you a bad teacher.  The first day that I started teaching, I taught the same lesson to two classes. I felt that it went relatively well the first time, and then bombed with the second class. Other than a few minor adjustments, the lesson was the same. After some reflection and talking with Mr. Brown and Mrs. Good, I realized that one bad lesson didn't mean I was doomed to have a terrible unit, and that the main reason I felt like I had failed was that the students had low energy levels that day. It's a class of only five, with one of those students being online, so when the four students that were in person were quiet and not very engaged with the lesson, it made me feel a lot more uncomfortable than if I had those four students mixed into a class with varying personalities. Luckily, the kids were more engaged with the next lesson, which definitely confirmed for me that it was just a bad day, and not every lesson will be like that.

4. Preparation is key. I started to change my plant science unit around last minute, which left me feeling like I wasn't that far ahead of the students. On Friday, I had an activity planned that required me to print out papers for the students. I had decided to come in earlier Friday morning to print them off, figuring that I would have plenty of time, and I would have...if not for the printer jamming. Luckily, Mrs. Good came to my rescue and was able to fix it, but I did have a small period of panic in my brain trying to figure out what I would replace the activity with if I couldn't get the papers before first period. I definitely learned that it's best to print what I need at least the day before the lesson, because you never know what issues you could run into.