Wednesday revolution

Wednesday, September 9th was quite a day. I had my first taste of teaching a class for the entire period. It didn’t even happen on purpose, which was interesting. For the first two periods of the day, I lead the students through their settle-in activity: analogies. During third period, I began the class and ended up continuing through the whole period. I lead the students through the RLP (reading log project). In this week-long project, students are required to read for twenty minutes nightly. Each day, there is a different literature activity to complete: character analysis, analogy, vocabulary, and literary devices. In order to model this for the students, we read the short story “A Day’s Wait” and completed the RLP. The students had already read “A Day’s Wait” the day before, so we were able to jump right in to “Monday’s” activity. This portion of the project instructed students to do a character analysis; I modeled an example on the overhead while asking for student input. Then, the students were to work independently to complete another character analysis. As the student were working, I walked around the room, scaffolding the assignment as needed. The class was then brought together to fill out the remaining character analysis on the overhead. “Tuesday’s” assignment had the students create two analogies based on the story. Once again, I modeled an analogy then had the students work. In order to get the students out of their seats, I used active learning. The students were to write their analogy on the board; when I pointed to their analogy, they had to explain the connection to the class. It took me by surprise when the bell rang. It felt as though the class period moved in hyper-time; I had no idea it was time for the students to be dismissed.

Looking back at Wednesday, I was nervous that when I asked a question, a hush would fall over the crowd. In fact, it had quite the opposite effect: it was such a rush to see eager hands raise with the answer. It was so incredibly satisfying to know that I was making sense and explaining things clearly. After I taught third period, I had a brief conversation with my cooperating teacher. She opened with only three words, but those three words made me feel an immense sense of pride:

“You are ready.”