Check-In 11

I taught my first official lesson on Friday. I started with what my mentor teacher deemed as the more difficult class, simply because they don’t engage as much as the other class. It went amazingly well! Students were actually engaged and I am far less stressed now after the lesson is over than I was going into it. Students are about to be reading Hamlet. Most, if not all, students have experience reading Shakespeare, but I still did a lesson about reading Shakespeare and understanding Old/Middle English (much of Shakespeare is written in an odd transition period between the two). I gave them a brief history and incorporated a lot of things that they might understand from the modern day that hadn’t necessarily changed for other languages. For example, English is, in part, Germanic, and we used to have words spelt with a ‘v’ instead of a ‘u’ and vice versa (the letters were almost interchangeable). I discussed how something similar happens in German where words with a ‘w’ are pronounced like a ‘v’ in Modern English and vice versa. I also brushed up on common vocabulary and literary terms and asked students to interpret some quotes from Shakespeare. I had to do a lot of frontloading since Shakespeare is widely contextual and students might not have had many context clues to work off of. I used Academic Standard 11-12.RL.2.1 to have them analyze what a text says implicitly and explicitly, and wanted them to activate prior knowledge and use deductions to create meaning. Everything went so well and students responded well to the activities. I had them respond to a quote from Monty Python (that I was surprised that none of them had seen), and explain to me what they think the language means and how/why they came to that conclusion. I think I’ll use this assessment for the edTPA. Because today’s lesson went so well, it makes me worry that my lesson with the other class tomorrow (Monday) will not go as well. Additionally, Dr. Spanke (from my ENG 395) is coming to observe tomorrow. I can only hope that the lesson goes as well as it did today.