Much to Learn

Recently, I've been caught in a whirlwind of experiences at West. I've seen numerous teachers, their teaching styles, and, most importantly, how they run their classrooms. I've also been to a pep rally that seemed dull at first, but definitely got the pep it was after before it was done. Of course, the most lasting impression came with teaching lessons and getting students engaged.

Lately, in some of the classrooms I have observed, I've noticed that too many teachers run their classrooms like ships. The teacher-captain gets all of the say, and the agenda is never at the whim of the students. With that, I can fully understand how many students would want to sleep in class rather than listen to their teacher ramble for an hour and a half, because I know that technique should be on its way out the door.

Perhaps the most startling example of this was when I noticed how one teacher thought about his lessons. As class began, he told his students to take out their vocabulary homework, and he read the answers out to the class. To me, this looked like a missed opportunity to see what the students learned from the homework. If he didn't want to hear how they answered the questions, why did he even make them do it?

This was not the end for his reign over the class, though. He also read a number of poems aloud to the students and rarely asked for feedback, but he did sometimes pause to clarify. I did not exactly expect him to group the students up and have them read separate poems, or anything slightly-more-than simplistic like that, but I did feel that the students could have at least done an activity to break up the monotony of the class, because the worst was yet to come.

For half an hour at least, he read to his tenth grade students. In some respects, this does not seem like an altogether bad idea, because some texts might require an approach like that. What I find to be most offensive, though, is that not a single student had a book to follow along with because the book he was reading was his own, written down in a binder, unpublished. To think that he should chose his own work to read for so long when the students couldn't even follow along upsets me, and reminds me that this profession is not about grandstanding before a crowd of young adults, but getting them involved and LEARNING.

For the very first lesson that I taught at West, I knew I had to make it a little fun and more engaging than just sitting at a desk, listening. I grabbed the funnest looking ball I could--a green, squishy ball with stretchy multicolored tentacles spaced fairly far apart--and (for lack of a better method) attached Post-Its to the ball and wrote directions such as "Two Synonyms/Antonyms," "Draw It," and "Act It Out," which the students would follow upon receiving the ball.

The students had to toss the ball about the room, from classmate to classmate, and the catcher would have to follow whichever direction was prescribed by the ball. For this, I had the students choose whichever direction was closest to their left thumbs. Then, the students came up to the room and had their classmates guess which word they had to showcase. And, if only for the action of throwing a squishy ball around the room, I saw that the kids were having fun, and that they--rather than I--taught themselves.