Today was one of those fun and enjoyable mornings in first period. It was also one that reminded me why I miss teaching history. We are doing background information on the Holocaust and WWII in preparation for reading the play of Anne Frank. I even went off on a tangent talking about how in bad economic times people always look for someone to blame like in southern California today many blame illegal immigration for all our school funding problems. They were all listening! I don’t think anyone was working on other homework, doodling, writing notes to each other, texting or sleeping! What a MIRACLE at this time of year! Even the usually silent kids were asking questions and thinking. Amazing how invigorating and exciting it is when kids THINK! All of this reminds me of when I first started teaching and was able to focus more on what kids cared about and to design my lesson in that way.
Next week we’re going to start our Autobiography Unit in the ELD classes and hopefully I will get the same involvement and response since they will be writing about themselves – the topic they of course care more about than anything else right now!
Anyway, obviously every day for the next three and a half weeks won’t be as good as today in period one but at least it’s a nice break in the world of checked out kids!
That sounds like an interesting lesson – I bet that you connected with them on a personal level when you brought up examples that are probably relevant to their lives. Keep the posts coming!
By: educatorblog on June 5, 2008
at 5:07 am