The title of this entry is the main question I struggled with this week when try to put WWI into a week and a half. This is the first time the time constraints are slightly binding because the test must fall on this coming Wednesday (HALLOWEEN!!!). After Wednesday our students are recieving four day weekend, due to parent teacher conferences, and I do not want them to come back and test the following week. So, everything must be complete by then and there is so much to cover.
My CT is letting me run the show, and with this means I am picking out the main points of the topics and going with what I feel is important. I like this freedom, but at time I feel inexperienced. I am not exactly sure what it will take for the students to get the BIG picture. I am having a difficult time deciding what to leave out. As we talked about with textbook bias last Monday, our textbook does not cover any battles in WWI besides the ones Americans fought in. This is upsetting because the war was going on for nearly three years before we joined it. Obviously the book is not placing an importance on this time period. So, in order for the students to get it they need to use other resources. I have to give them these because our library and traveling computers are signed out for the next two months straight (this is anothe source of frustration). I ended up cutting it down to the two major battles before the U.S. entered, but even now I do not know if that was the right answer. Also, I am having a tough time fitting the geography into the work. I tried to cover it with an annotated battle map, thinking I would kill two birds with one stone, but the students did not do well with this. They were very vague on locations (if that is possible). The whole geography in general is difficult to fit in, because on our wrap up day we should cover the League of Nations, Reparations, Wilson’s Fourteen Points, Post WWI Maps, Treaty of Versialles, and more. It is just so much information to fit into a lesson.
I guess these types of questions are answered with experience and as I continue in these semester and next, hopefully some of the kinks will be worked out. It is amazing looking at a lesson plan you thought would go so well and take a certain amount (usually I am thinking of what can be done in case the lesson runs short ) of time and then after you are saying….”what the heck happened to the 72 minutes.” I am working on understanding the motto, “Practice makes Perfect”, or at least semi-perfect.
