Student Teaching, second day

It’s actually my third day in the classroom…but my second day giving lessons.

Oh, it’s such a joy to be back in the classroom doing stuff! In the past two days I’ve given lessons on:

• The History of the English Language (telling the story of the development of English…starting from Proto-Indo-European!)
• The beginning steps to extracting the square root of a number
• The parts of a Porifera (did you know that sponges can move 40 gallons of water per day through their bodies?!)
• Transitive and Intransitive Verbs
• The Active and Passive Voice
• Classification of Adverbs (they don’t just modify verbs, they can modify adverbs, too. As in, “She is so incredibly talented!”)
• Types of Compound leaves
• Divisibility by 2, 5, 25, 4, and 8

West Germanic and its descending languages

A Palmately Compound Leaf

Imparipinnately Compound Leaf

And there’s so, so much more to do!

My favorite lesson today was the history of English lesson. They loved learning about all of English’s “distant cousins,” like Frisian, and had a really great time looking at images of the Beowulf and Chaucer texts. It really is mind boggling, even for me, to wrap my mind around how dramatically English has changed since 500 CE.

I also loved giving the Porifera lesson. The lead guide in this class has collected an amazing variety of animal and plant specimens over the years, so I had a lot of great sponges to work with. I gave the lesson to one girl, who had come up to me asking for the lesson after she had seen me give it to some others yesterday. We had a wonderful time together, then at the very end, another girl came up wanting to learn more. I asked the first girl to share what she had learned from my seven minute presentation…and the two of them pored over the specimens and books for the last half hour of the day! I love that thrill of stepping back and watching their interest just blossom.

Tomorrow I’m pretty excited to give presentations on the Pythagorean Theorem, more types of leaves, the algebraic formula of a trinomial, complex clauses, and some demonstrations on how wind works…

My biggest challenge so far has been finding the balance between “sowing as many seeds as possible” while at the same time allowing space for reflection and follow up work. We strive to give the students space to just work with an idea for a while, and we try to avoid constant interruptions to deep concentration and focus, yet…in order to keep the class environment dynamic and exciting, we need to give as many lessons as possible in a diversity of disciplines. That’s really the art of this work, what distinguishes a good teacher from an amazing one.

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