Lessons from a rabbit

I'm going to write about last week at school because I have nothing good to say thus far about school this week, and I heard from a little rabbit named Thumper that if you have nothing nice to say don't say anything at all (note to self: show that clip in class sometime soon because it is a lesson my students are currently unable to grasp).

Read 180 is still not up and working. Because I got real tired to sitting around and waiting for the program to be ready for me to teach, I just decided to teach what I want. I got together with my MTLD and we came up with a week-long plan. I taught the short story "The Lottery," and did a compare/contrast lesson between the text of the story and a short movie I found. I was very hesitant going into the week because nothing seemed to interest my students, and I wasn't sure how they would be interested in a story that seemingly had nothing to do with their lives, and an extremely outdated movie. Let me just say, it was the best week thus far.

It took a few days to get them interested, but I think just the fact that they had structure and a consistent topic to work on for the whole week - it transformed (most of) my classes. By the end of the week, my students were discussing and debating the ending (some of them just really didn't want to believe that the stoning actually killed Tessie), and making connections to our society today. My first class has risen to become the most enjoyable part of my day.

We spent three days reading the story (I broke it into three parts for them), and watching the corresponding part of the movie. Then, we filled out a compare/contrast chart, focusing on the setting, characters, and plot (with a mini-lesson on plot). Thursday they split into groups and created one big compare/ contrast chart for the week. I was amazed by how many groups were on-task for the whole group time. Friday, they had a creative writing assignment where they had to choose to write a diary entry, newspaper article or monologue about the story. Once again, my first block blew me out of the water with the amount of creativity I got from them. I'm actually thinking of just pretending I only teach my first block because it would make getting up in the morning (still at 5 am, let me remind you) a whole lot easier.

It gave me a hopeful glance at what my class might be like once I actually have week-long lessons to teach. Of course, the rest of my classes completely shattered this hope this week, but I'll stop there because I'm getting into the dangerous realm Thumper once warned me about.

I'm going to enjoy my last few minutes of internet here at Starbucks before heading home to sleep off this horrid day (someone please start bugging me until I call the Cox guy to get me some internet).