Reflection 3

Teaching Something 2 was hard. Geoff tricked me, and I thought we were going to plan to teach something as a group. So, I assumed we would all have the same lesson plan, that's what I understood. Ignorantly sinning, I went into Teach Something 2 not prepared with no lesson plan. Fortunately, I had my laptop with me, so I was able to make one rather quickly. However, my decision was not the greatest, it was based off what someone else did which was do Teach Something 1 again, except without the technical difficulties. For me, that meant I tried to teach StarCraft 2 again.

I think they were bored as I showed them the video for the second time. They sure looked like it, and I think I picked the wrong crowd for video games. Though, this time, I paused the video, asked questions (that they had a hard time answering, or answered with an obvious answer. Not good on my part), and explained what was going on in the video. I also explained my objectives clearly before I started teaching. This time it might have gone better had I prepared. Yet, I was more prepared to teach StarCraft 2 than I was to just teach something off the seat of my pants (though, T. showed it could be done easily when he taught off the seat of his pants).

I was originally planning to teach Wikidpad, a wiki creation program, but I went with StarCraft 2 again for reasons listed above. What I learned from this is maybe I should have tried to teach something more academic than fun—I had a hard time trying to find the "why are we learning this?" point for it.

On reflecting on the class, I must say I actually have to agree with Geoff. No, I'm serious, I am agreeing with Geoff about the moral dimensions, that you need to be invested in them in order to be a good teacher. Why? Because of the many things I've read that work about teaching and what doesn't work, and the four moral dimensions (PEEP) fit right into those ideas of teaching. Now, I'm not particularly interested in teaching, just becoming a good web designer/graphical designer to support me while I write my novels. However, I'm going to go with the flow and see if I like teaching.

When we talked about learning and expontential growth (and reading it in the book) made me realize what a sloppy learner I am. I hardly remember anything from my classes of previous semesters, and as the months go by, I forget more an more. I want to learn how to remember and apply. When I look at school, I look at it like a job: just get it done. I don't seem to have the love of learning that I ought to have in order to gain something from school. It's funny how I learned this now after being in BYU for five years, it sounds like it's time to change my attitude.