I Am Headed Toward Teaching with Great Aplomb

So tonight was cool.

Tonight was kind of an "aha" moment, if you will. On Tuesday nights, I have my methods class. In this class, I spend two and a half hours actually learning how to instruct my future students. This evening, we worked through a lesson about rhyme, using poetry. We, as a class, got to act like a group of over-sized (and in some cases, over-hairy) bunch of middle-schoolers. Just for the record, this is how the lesson proceeded:

We were split up into groups of five or six.
We were directed to parts of the room that had giant pieces of butcher's paper taped up to the wall.
Each group was given a Crayola marker.
The teacher instructed all of us to write as many words ending in one particular sound as we could in thirty seconds.
She did it again for three more word sounds.
In all, there was an -eat, an -ack, an -at, and an -it.
Once we had all our words put up on the paper, she asked us what was going on between all those words in each list. Our response, after we'd gotten out of the college mode of thinking, was that the words all sound the same.
She explained to us that this similar word-sound is called rhyme.
At that point, she asked us to all spend a few minutes in our groups making up little poems.
(Our poem was as follows:
Pull your shirt down in the back
Else your face is headed for a smack
Tell your belt to lose its slack
'Cause no one wants to see YOUR CRACK!
We thought this to be terribly clever, and endearingly puerile.)
Finally, we were all allowed to read our poems to the rest of the class - both our instructor and the lot of us knew that no one would be satisfied until we had all shared.

Sorry for the distraction, but imagine, if you will (and if you hadn't already), a group of twenty-something twenty-somethings doing this, and the result is an amusing little scene. Of course I had to share.

Anyway, after we were given an example of a particular lesson plan played out, we looked at the written version of it, and started making connections. Then, we were asked to partner up and work with that person over the next week on creating a lesson plan over rhythm. (Of no real consequence, but perhaps worth knowing anyway - my partner and I settled on a lesson plan that teaches iambic pentameter, for inclusion with a unit on Shakespeare.)

Since we had a little class time left, we all set to work on our lesson plans. My partner and I floundered a little, trying to decide where to start, and what was most important, and all that...but at some point, it just clicked. We started pulling random bits of information out of the air and putting them in place in the page set aside in my OneNote school notebook. (I love that program, by the way.) We started playing verbal, lesson-plan-writing ping-pong. Ideas flew back and forth, bouncing onto the page and leaving a mark each time, some little bit of information, of instruction where there once had been white space. And eventually, I got on a roll. (I know that the phrase is overused, but I can't help it - I like it.) I started spouting off group work elements, necessary materials, assessment guidelines, all without hesitation. (I'm sure I frustrated my partner though - people were asking questions about my computer, and I felt obliged to answer them for the sake of being helpful. See, they were borrowing the computer, so my partner was relegated to taking down was I was saying in the meantime in good, old-fashioned, handwritten text. So she had to filter computer speak from stuff that was actually important.)

So the short and skinny of it is this: I got really freakin' excited about writing my lesson plan. It wasn't especially creative, or innovative. But I felt like I knew what I was doing, and that I had not only a very clear idea of what would be needed to accomplish the goals we set forth, but a way to accomplish those goals while addressing the different learning styles of a class full of unique students. The end was tied up neatly, and I felt like our assessment was complete, but not overbearing, and fit in well with the flow of the whole activity. Succinctly put, it was very smooth. And this encourages me. I've never (truly) doubted that I have what it takes to be an effective teacher, but to jump into real-world application so quickly and effortlessly was empowering. I know it won't always be this easy, but I am now that much more excited for what I have to learn this semester.

Things are suddenly very real to me, and it's the good kind of "things are suddenly very real to me." I love it.