My habits are getting better and better. I'm looking forward to some of the lesson ideas that I have planned for this unit. However, the in-class reading of the play (Julius Caesar) hasn't been going well. The class talks the whole time. Today, I had to have them sit in silence for the rest of the class and assigned the rest of Act I and the first scene in Act II for homework. And they are getting quizzed on all of it tomorrow. And it's going to be a HARD quiz.
In an ideal class, I would have started the year out better. Now I know how it feels to be Mrs. Vollmer, my choir teacher. All we did was talk. We never listened to her, and it didn't mean anything when she got angry. We were good for maybe the rest of the class period, but it never lasted long. I always thought that she started out too nice and ambitious at the beginning of the year. I can't wait to start over; to try at it again. But I'm not shrugging off this year. My student teaching supervisor told me that teaching is like parenting: it's one day at a time. Every day is a new day. Hopefully, tomorrow is a good day.
My goal: To have next week planned in it's entirety by Friday at 7pm.
What that entails: all handouts typed and copied, all lesson plans written out, all grading caught up (hopefully by Wednesday night for Parent-Teacher Conferences). Speaking of those, I'm so excited! I want to meet parents. I'm also excited for the parents to get the passwords for their students' Gradebook online. That might motivate a couple students to start participating more in class.
I'm thinking about designing the culminating activity for this unit in a condensed, adapted version of the "leveled instruction" procedure that I learned about on Friday, where the lower-level cognition activities will be worth less points, and the higher level will be worth more. I'm curious to try it with this class and see how it goes.
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