What a Mess!!

Teaching at the middle school was an exhausting experience! Much of it went according to plan, but there were still some exciting surprises!

The biggest surprise for me was just how much of a mess our activity made! We anticipated the excitement and the chaos, but we were surprised to see the trash left at the end of the assemblies. As a result the clean-up time had to bite into our time to review what the students learned and check their understanding.

I was also surprised to find when it was time to race the cars that a great majority of the students did not understand how the cars worked. They were putting them down backwards and not understanding why some basic parts weren't working. It would have been well worth the time to go over the car and how it's made and how it works before allowing the students to form their assembly lines.

One other thing we could have done to make things go better would have been to have a pause in the assembly line process to get the students to analyze their method to see if there was a way to improve their process. I think it would have been easier to check for understanding midway than any other time.

It was an exciting lesson. I think I learned as much from the students as they learned from me.

Teaching History

I've been struggling lately with planning my portion of our lesson on the assembly line to teach the 6th graders. I have to teach the history of the assembly line. I'm finding two main struggles with this section:

1) History is really hard to summarize in an interesting way so that you can teach it in only 5 minutes.

2) By nature of the subject, it is a lot less hands-on and more difficult to use various types of pedagogy to teach it. I find myself just resorting to the standard powerpoint show and tell method. Luckily I thought of semantically encoding some of the information to make it easier to remember.

Finally after getting frustrated as I was trying to magically make the history more interesting I realized that I was trying too hard. I find the information I was sharing to be inherently interesting. I think I was trying too hard to make it interesting when it ALREADY is. It made me realize that sometimes a teacher just has to appeal to the natural curiosity within the student.