ECS field log: Oct. 25, 2010

Today I taught my first lesson, together with my field partner. I was pretty nervous. The big plan was to teach a Phys-ed lesson, where we taught the kids some footballs skills, mainly throwing, catching, and running routes. We originally planned to teach them the very basics of gripping the football to throw it, and where to place their hands to catch it, then following up with a warmup, and an exercise where students ran routes and caught a pass, undefended at first, and defended afterward.

We ran into some issues kind of early. First off, My partner and I had to basically participate in order to get some kids off of the bench, as they didn't have anyone to play catch with, and pairing these two kids together was asking for trouble. The one was a bit more of an instigator, and the other was obviously incredibly shy and nervous about doing the activity at all. This kept us from being able to watch the students, and comment on what they should do to improve their skills. However, our co op took over this role, which was pretty considerate.

There was another issue in running the routes... no matter what routes we told the students to run (We had a sheet of paper that illustrated the routes, neither him nor I expected the students to know any route by name), the students would basically run a very sloppy out, or lazy post. I started only telling students to run curls, to see if any of them would catch on, even with extended explanation. No such luck. At this point, we decided to scrap the exercise with the defender, as it would have been a debacle, I'm sure.

We moved, afterward, just onto a game of continuous football. It's pretty well "Ultimate frisbee" with a football. Two steps with the ball, ball can't touch the ground, students had to get the ball in either net. We split the gym into two halves to get more kids involved, and get the kids more touches. This worked out well, the students really liked this game, and everyone got involved in some regard.

I was a bit worried, personally, about an adaptive dimension. There are two students in the class who are pretty well missing a hand, through a birth defect. We asked the teacher what we should do, and he said they adapt themselves. Going too overboard in catering to them only singles them out or alienates them. Honestly, he was right. They made some dandy catches, and the one might catch better than I can.

The rest of the day was pretty standard, we helped out with this, that, and the other. My ECS partner and I kind of discussed some classroom management strategies, as the music teacher used the waiting strategy, and basically whittled the whole class away, as half of the class talked freely and the other half got frustrated. With this, I don't think waiting is always the best strategy, and sometimes you have to cut more of an imposing figure to keep a class in line. Nothing too out of hand, but this teacher would have done herself a favor in taking a more active role in classroom management.

And that was the morning in my ECS class. Next week I'm teaching a social studies lesson on the long rifle debate in Canada.