Valuable Lessons...

This week was filled with valuable lessons for me. Right now I will concentrate on the two areas where I learned the most. The first was learning to hold my ground while allowing the student to feel in control and/or to make the choice. This came about when my co-op was out for the day and there was no sub. I've been teaching this class for over a week and everything was going well. I explained an assignment which was to work on a group project. As soon as I started to hand out the rubric, a student said to me that she does not do this; she does not work in groups. I said, "Well, I'm sorry to hear that but this is the assignment" and continued to pass out the rubric. After I reviewed the rubric with the class and was walking around the class she again told me that she does not do this. At this point some very valuable words played through my mind. I believe I even wrote about these words in an earlier blog and they were: “You have the right to fail.” Of course I didn’t want to say this to this student because she was already red in the face and very bothered by the assignment and the fact that I was not backing down. So I very calmly said to her, “That is your choice. But this assignment is going to be graded and a good portion of your grade, so you decide.” With that I walked away and continued to work with the other students. I could see and feel how uncomfortable this student was and I was becoming uncomfortable for her. I saw her emailing (we’re in a computer lab) and she was rather distraught. Iwas walking around the class acting like everything is fine thinking to myself that this is the first day without a teacher or a sub in the class and I have a good student who is going to walk out on me! My mind is going around and around thinking that I should let her work on her own. Maybe if I increased the requirements for her since she wouldn’t have to collaborate she would work on the project. And then, again, I heard my first co-op telling her students that they had the right to fail. So, being reinforced with that in my mind I decided that I would give her until the next day and then let her work on her own. Well, about 15 min. before the class was over I had my answer. I heard her say to two girls in the back that she did some research on their topic and could she work with them. Whew!!! What a relief for me. I don’t think she knew how much she tested me. I was so glad that she made that choice. I knew if I gave in to her that I would have lost the respect of the entire class and I never would have won them back.

The next lesson lies in knowing your audience or should I say students. I started teaching Accounting I this week. The class has seniors and juniors in it and one of the terms we covered was adequate disclosure. Being a new teacher and trying to fully explain the concept and its meaning, I started to talk about Enron. I mentioned how adequate disclosure is essentially what got Enron into trouble and as I am talking I am looking around and getting completely blank stares. These kids will usually give me a nod, a smile, or a comment but there was nothing. And then it dawned on me… they were only 8 or 9 years old when that was big news! They don’t remember it. So now I have to give them a little history lesson too which was very brief but none of them were interested in it. I lost them by going back 8 years! Wow, talk about having to keep the lessons current to connect! So, now I know to try to use examples from the past year, maybe two at the most.

If I could change this past week it would involve that accounting class. Not only did I refer to a topic that they have no memory of, but I also assumed because they did something in a previous chapter that they would pick up and do it again. We did a ‘work together’ activity which was going very well because I had the students come up and write on the smartboard which was a novelty for them. So we went through the journal entries and the how’s and the why’s and I told them to post and when they were done with that, to start on the ‘On Your Own’ activity. I gave them a couple of minutes and a student called me over with some questions. She is an ELL and didn’t get what I meant when I told them to post so I walked her through it. When we were done I walked around the class and found the students working on the ‘On Your Own’ activity. After the class was over I found out that none of them posted because they didn’t understand it. I need to walk them through each step. Just because they learned posting and have been posting to accounts for the past two chapters does not mean that they fully understand it. The ELL student was the only one brave enough to ask! I would definitely want to do that lesson over again and walk them step by step through the entire thing… even if I think it is repetitive. What I think is repetitive may not be to them because they’re just learning it. My fear has been not to bore them but because of that I think I may have been cutting them short. I now believe that it would be better to bore them as long as they have learned the material. Let them tell me that we’ve been over this before but I don’t ever want to cut them short again because of my fear of boring them.