This week I began my unit of teaching. I am covering Imperialism. I wasn’t sure how much I would enjoy the topic and I was having a rough time coming up with different activities. Like it always seems to do, everything came together just in time for me to finish planning and the week has really shaped up. The best part about it is that the students really seem to enjoy what we are doing and I believe they are grasping the concept. Because I was having a difficult time picking what activities I really liked I think I came up with more than needed.
On Monday I used a wide variety of activities. The students did some brainstorming and worked with documents and charts. I thought they truly grasped the topic of imperialism. On Tuesday the students began a cooperative learning assignment. I had them do News Broadcasts. Each pair had to study an example of Imperialism in the late 1800’s to early 1900’s. They had to find the five W’s and then create a two to three minute broadcast with a visual. They presented their portion to the rest of the class who need to take notes for the quiz that would follow. I was not extrememly happy with the use of their class time. The seemed slightly under prepared to me. The broadcasts were decent, but I thought the students could have rehearsed more. I had to fill in more holes than planned. This did reflect in their scores and I hope this becomes a learning experience for them. When I graded the quizes I thought the scores were average to above, so I know they got the information, just not exactly the way I had planned.
Today the students recieved a prompt for the debate they will do tomorrow. I think this will be a good activity because they seemed to work hard on the research portion in the library today. This may be because I scared them about the use of their worktime. But whatever gets them moving.
Besides the actual teaching I feel like there is so much to do. I am constatly grading and entering grades into the computer. I am creating nearly every assignment, so even constructing them is taking a considerable amount of time. I am finding that I am trying to squeeze all of the different college of ed assignments in. I am not happy about that right now and I think my quality of work in the classes is going down, but I think my focus should be in my school classroom. I think I need to be superb there. This balancing act is definatly not fun.
