My second day of teaching went very well. I was able to solidify a job working at the ticket gate for the home football games and working the chain at the scrimmage on Friday. I have been wanting to get more involved in the school and it was nice to get the chance to, while also being around football.
The first honors history class of the day went very well. Students were lined up outside the door waiting to come in before the period started. I could definitely tell that there is a bit more excitement and energy in the honors class or maybe just overall more interest in history. However, as I have learned from being one in high school, honors students also know how to "play the game" sometimes maybe making it seem like they are very interested in order to make the teacher happy. Either way, now as an educator I do appreciate the energy either way. As with yesterday, the About Me presentation went well and the students seemed to enjoy it. Instead of having a PowerPoint going over the road to the Civil War, we gave a quiz that tested some knowledge of what the students should have learned last year. Unfortunately, we recognized that many students had hardly got to the Civil War and that was the main gap in knowledge.
The Feel the History class was a new experience that I am excited about. For one, teaching juniors and seniors is a huge difference compared to freshman. Not only physically, but in maturity and demeanor, seniors are leaps ahead of high school freshman. I'm definitely going to have to work on making the transition because upper class men teaching strategies are going to differ from what works with freshman. In the introduction, for example, I did not use my PowerPoint because we needed to be brief and get down to the class. I can already tell that certain attempts at connections or stuff that I think would be cool to show students might be harder to do with upper class men because of their age. I can definitely sense a feeling of being too old or "cool" to be excited or laugh at certain things in class. I think it is actually going to be harder to connect with them than with my freshman students, even though we are closer in age. A lot of the students already have a relationship with Mr. Carl, which is another barrier for me to cross in order to hopefully connect with them. The class is extremely interesting though and I am excited to work with the students. Mr. Carl focused on expectations of the professionalism in the documentaries and explained B roll in good documentary footage by using past documentaries from other classes and an excerpt from Ken Burns. I was blown away by the former students production of the UE plane crash. Part of the following period I spent some time looking up possible topics to research for the students since the class has covered a lot of history in the past and new topics are a little difficult to come by.
The final class also went well, as it was a history honors class. Pretty much the same outcome as the first. I can definitely tell that I feel that I have more excitement and energy in the morning, which could be a challenge for my later classes.
Tomorrow is the first Friday and I believe it is the first day I will be helping out with Apex during Enrichment. I am learning a lot, but I am also feeling the need to jump in a little more and start teaching some small parts of the lesson. I like that I am feeling comfortable with the classes and I hope to keep improving on my comfort level as I go on.
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