Sep 22

Today was a bit challenging, but I certainly got lots of material for my undergrads! The sped teacher I'm working with took it personally that I gave an assessment of student progress, because she thought it meant I was saying she was a bad teacher. Of course this never crossed my mind, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that I chose the wrong course of action. I should have instead talked with them privately and expressed my concerns. Even that might not have worked, but the students actually did not know the material. Then the teacher wanted me to "re-teach" on the spot. Such is the case with real teaching -- sometimes you just have to make it up as you go along! Not my forte, but that's why I decided to do this project. It's because I miss the immediacy of needing to come up with something, now, or react to student behavior out in left field, now.

So, you may ask, what did I do? I decided to create an outline with the students and have them save it for their records. It was an outline of all the parts of speech they had learned. Only one or two had ever heard of an outline before, but they did a very nice job participating. I was very pleased to see their willingness to participate when I was leading the discussion. They weren't afraid to make a mistake in front of me, which is great. So we outlined and reviewed each of the parts of speech we had learned, and discussed how to make an outline along the way. I told them when I used outlines in my work, and how it's easy to remember the new stuff and forget the old. As one student said, "It just flies away with the wind," which is exactly what does happen!

Things went from bad to worse. The teacher asked me to teach adverbs when I had told her I wasn't good at adverbs. She said I was on a roll and should keep going. As I was still in the doghouse, I couldn't refuse. Again my fault for not preparing because I didn't think I'd be teaching the material! I made it through everything until we had to come up with examples and I had to tell students whether they were right or wrong. I got help from the other teachers in the room, which was embarrasing on my part but also a bit of a bonding experience. We professors don't know everything, but it could be argued, and quite well, that we should know our adverbs.