Reflection on Teaching

There are times when the world is quiet enough that my mind begins to swim and my thoughts almost drown me.  I introspect maybe too severely.  I question everything which usually leads to doubt.  I am in my junior year of college and it has been hitting me hard that soon I will have to leave my comfort zone and enter the real world.  Every so often, I ask myself if teaching is the right path for me.  Sometimes I think that it's not.  However, my in-class lesson has made me so much more confident that teaching is something I can do and be great at it.

I had never taught or made any lesson plans before this class.  I was nervous but having Michele as my co-teacher really calmed me down.  When we began our lesson plan, we knew that poetry would probably be the best thing to teach for a class period so short.  Since Poe's poetry is so unlike anything else and we are both huge fans, we decided to teach "The Raven" because both the teachers and students would enjoy it.  To prepare for the lesson, we browsed through YouTube and found three videos that we could use.  I made the copies of "The Raven," inserting footnotes where certain words or references were unclear and setting it up in an attractive way.  We arrived an hour before class to get our videos open, timer ready, and the SmartBoard exercise set up.  I wish that we had analyzed the poem together because at one point, my analysis did not match Michele's which was a little embarrassing.  We planned for bad behaviors by considering the things that might happen and how we as teachers should handle them.  We also put students into groups before the lesson even started so that misbehaving would be more difficult since the offender wouldn't be encouraged by another friend.  I think that we handled misbehavior pretty well overall.

The objectives of the lesson are as follows: 
    1.      Students will be able to discuss the theme of “The Raven.”
    2.      Students will be able to identify the rhyme scheme of the poem.
    3.      Students will be able to cite examples of alliteration, internal rhyme, and repetition throughout  the poem. 
 If this were a real lesson plan, this material would have been stretched over a few days so that the students do not get overwhelmed. In order to assess that the students learned these objectives, we asked people from each group to come up to the SmartBoard and underline the literary devices that they were assigned.  We should have had each of the students hand in their own papers of the literary devices so that we would be able to see that every student learned the objectives.


Overall, the lesson went very well.  There were a few minor glitches but for my first lesson I am very happy with the results.  I think the tools we used to teach the literary devices were very effective but again, I would stretch this lesson over a couple of periods.  What I really learned from this experience is that I need to become more comfortable with my classroom.  I was a little nervous so I was not my normal, excited, eccentric self. I'm sure with some more practice though, I'll be able to be a great teacher.