What happened in the classroom

One of my big challenges was getting my story for change right. When we got together to plan our lesson we watched my reedit of the my story for change. I did not think about it too much when I was reworking it but both Sam and Sammi thought that it was too violent for 7 graders. So I went back and worked on it again and tried to make it even, even better by re-reworking it. I am very glad because I really feel that my story for change was really good and I even was told by Benjamin that it was really good. It did make me feel slightly defeated when the very first movie that was mentioned after I showed my video was Gladiator, a very much rated R movie. Which was followed by a questionable PG-13 movie. So all my re-rework felt a little pointless but I know that it was best that I made it more kid friendly.

The other thing that happened while we were planning is that we bounced back and forth with what we wanted to teach. We really wanted to tie the lesson in to what they were already learning about, which was research. But we kept leading ourselves away to media literacy. Then we finally realized that we could teach both. So we started the lesson talking about research and how students do it all the time and then we ended the lesson with changing stories and picking good ones as well.

I was very excited to see Sam teach, he got the kids involved and got them talking. He was fun and upbeat and he got the kids thinking with his questions and he also kept them in control when they started to get too excited.

Sammi keep everything very organized. She is a teacher at the MTC and it showed in the organization of our lesson. Also she was very sweet with all of the kids that she talked to.

I was very excited to teach them and I was a little surprised when I got up there to talk because I felt like they listened to me. The sat quietly while I talked for a bit and helped them understand our messages.

Our goal was to help them understand that research can be fun and also that we can chose good media. I felt like that it came through very clearly but our class was very well behaved that day. I am not sure what else to write about just that it felt like it went really good. There was one part when I started to panic because we started an activity where they could either draw or write a new ending to a story. I looked around the room and everyone had blank pages, but this was only because they were thinking. Soon their papers were filled and they were excited to share their new story.

So my teaching technique is to make good choices and to discuss the films that we see. I feel like we very much introduced the idea and that if we could teach more times we would be able to help them do this even better. Though I am very surprised at how much we were able to teach in our short 50 minutes or so. It really was the highlight of this class for me.