This week started with me teaching a lesson on similes and metaphors. Whoof. Well, my co op teacher gave me a package with a bunch of question sheets and lesson ideas. My week was such a zoo that I relied heavily on it for my lesson. I had a big idea to teach about similes, ask the students about similes, have them come up with some, and work on a worksheet about it... same with metaphors...
As a side note, I've kind of noticed that I'm really into questioning in my lessons. I'm constantly going to the students for examples or answers instead of providing them myself. Hmm.
But as I was saying... The lesson was funny, because here it turns out that the co op had already gone through a lesson like this before... complete with the same worksheet i was using. I felt like a pretty big fool, because I'd have figured this out if I had kept better correspondence with my co op teacher. I could have just made up my own worksheet... the lesson may have still been redundant, but at least I'd have had something newer and creative. But yes, this fact caused my lesson to run way shorter. The students knew everything already, so any time I'd allotted to wrong answers or general discussion was now free. Also, I was less inclined to get really in depth with it. So I handed out the two sheets... I guess most of them never really did them initially, or had forgotten about them, so it wasn't so bad. It sucks though, I like going around helping students with activities like that, and most of them were just running through it mechanically with little thought...
Mr. X's lesson came after. He had one on Paul Henderson's jersey, also heavily reliant on a package the co op teacher gave us. It was a decent lesson, just on current events... I guess Paul Henderson's jersey recently went for a cool million to some private... well, millionaire, Mitchell Goldhar. The big idea was that Mr. X told the students the whole story, and then handed out a question sheet as a type of quiz. It was fun to go around helping the students... some of them could not have given less of a damn though. I mean, as soon as they heard "Hockey," they tuned out. The slice of Canadian history it represented was besides the point... hockey sucked, in their opinion, and as such lessons related to it also sucked. The sheet Mr. X handed out also had a "critical and creative thinking" section on it... I always get a charge out of students' reasoning and answers. Here's hoping that lasts long into my teaching career, as right now I like reading assignments.
After Recess, it was the same thing, math with the teacher for whom nobody behaves. This time, I actually started going around trying to give her a hand. I didn't want to step on her toes, but like... I saw one kid try to punch another kid in the face. I went and had a frank exchange of ideas with this student about the time and place for facepunches... which is never and nowhere, respectively.
All in all, a decent week. Next time I'm teaching a lesson on creative paragraph writing. Stay tuned... same bat time, same bat channel.
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