Reflection 8 - STL

Teaching the STLs today was quite the challenge. I think I may have chosen the wrong object to teach: a LAN. My objective was the following: “Communication systems are made up of source, encoder, transmitter, receiver, decoder, storage, retrieval, and destination.” A LAN was given as an example of this in the STL book, and I thought since I had experience with LANs and I have a brother who is very intelligent and knows a lot more about LANs that it would be a perfect subject for me. Boy, was I wrong. I could not find on the internet how a LAN decodes and encodes information, hence why my presentation was so short, my brother said to look at “Ethernet” on Wikipedia, but warned me that the subject was far too complex for the grade level I marked in my Lesson Plan. Therefore, I took it out.

I want to capture something here that's important: my groupmates' lessons. I thought they, especially Kyle and Amy, did an excellent job. They used the board, videos, activities, and power points in effective ways. The board was used effectively in that it was used to write the answers that the class gave, and to show the points that the 'teachers' were making. I liked Amy's introduction to her lesson, it was creative and tied well into what she was teaching. That's effective because a creative introduction is memorable and helps a person remember the lesson more clearly. Kyle's activity was interesting, and involved the whole class, making the lesson feel, in my opinion, more student-centered than teacher-centered. I think that's effective as it also makes the lesson more memorable. One could say, “hey, remember that time when we split into two groups? I remember that lesson!” because of Kyle's activity.

Going back to my subject choice, I think it was ineffective because the only video I could find was a boring “how to build a LAN” video. That could have been exciting, but the way it was executed, it would have bored the class to tears, and I didn't want to do that. Also, I could not think of a creative opening for my lesson—a video, an activity, or whatever. Therefore, it lacked the grabbing effect that I needed for my lesson. Granted, I could have searched harder for something similar to a video of people communicating in a way that is analogous to a LAN, but I didn't think of that until after I taught.

I think overall the reason I was not as effective as Kyle and Amy is that I didn't give myself plenty of time to prepare my lesson. I did it the night before, like Geoff mentioned. Upon reflecting this, I'm going to take action that I mentioned in my teaching analysis: I'm going to give myself time to prepare for the lesson and choose the best topic I can think of for the type of assignment I've been given the next time I teach. I think then, next time, I will be better.

Was I more effective this time than the first two? I think so. I addressed the class, and I had a different topic this time. I was also watching myself throughout the entire lesson instead of focusing on how to condense the lesson into a small space of time.

This has been a good learning experience for me; I know now to think about the questions I'm going to ask and try to work with someone to answer it whenever I ask one, give pre-testing, and try to evaluate learning throughout the lesson. I know that the last part is not necessary, and that a review is fine, but I want to try out testing throughout the lesson instead as one of my new approaches to teaching. Expect something new and exciting from me next time.

Reflection 7 - Hedges and Learning

I was reading in the Marzano book, and I have to say that I disagree with Hedges. I may not have done intensive research or have statistics to back me up, but I disagree because I feel like he is wrong in one way or another. I think it's because he believes that educational research is weak, and isn't as important as the “hard sciences.” After all I've learned about teaching, I really feel like he's wrong about that because teaching is important for the future.

Let's take the world's greatest teacher, Christ. He brought forth the Church of Christ through His teachings. While it fell after a short time of being on the earth, it was restored again in 1830. Even after centuries of silence from the heavens, Christ's teachings, and the teachings of His Apostles touched the heart, spirit, and mind of a fourteen year old boy that led to the restoration of the true Church. Christ has had a phenomenal influence on the world because of His teachings (and of course, His crucifixion, and resurrection) which were brought forth over 2,000 years ago. Thus, His teachings have had a profound influence on the world throughout time. It proves that teaching matters, much more than Hedges thinks it does.

I have very little left to say. I'd just like to add that my love for teaching is slowly growing, hence why I jumped on Hedges a little hard here, and my love for learning is growing. There's probably hope for me after all.

Remember when I said I was a "sloppy" learner? I remembered a time when I did learn something from a class. I was in an English class, and had the book called The House of Mirth. I hated it. It taught so many evil things, and made me wonder why on earth it was considered a classic. The book taught the following: Being good doesn't get you anywhere, except death (suicide) in the end; you can do bad things and get away with them; you can frame the goodie-two-shoes with your evil acts; and being important to society is all that matters.

These things disgusted me, and I swore never to write a book like this one, ever. Even if it meant that I couldn't get into the English Canon (which is one of my goals as a novelist), I just was not going to walk down that path. That day, I learned what I really wanted to write as an aspiring novelist. As a teacher, I also will never teach anything that could depress my students, and not inspire them with anything worthy of God.

Reflection 6 - Aren't We All Redeemers?

Today, we started with “Teach Something 3.” Seeing what it was like was starting to give me an idea of how I should set up my lesson plan. However, I was, at first, thrown off by the fact that the group itself did not teach, but one person at a time was teaching. It intimidated me because I had just gone over my own teaching with MediaNotes, and seeing all the errors that I had made, I almost signed myself off as someone who cannot teach.

Yet, I cannot give up. I was reading in Alma 9 today, and after reading it, I went back and looked at certain verses. They are as follows: “For there are many promises which are extended to the Lamanites; for it is because of the traditions of their fathers that caused them to remain in their state of ignorance; therefore the Lord will be merciful unto them and prolong their existence in the land.... And not many days hence the Son of God shall come in his glory; and his glory shall be the glory of the Only Begotten of the Father, full of grace, equity, and truth, full of patience, mercy, and long-suffering, quick to hear the cries of his people and to answer their prayers. And behold, he cometh to redeem those who will be baptized unto repentance, through faith on his name” (Alma 9: 16, 26-27, bold added).

Now, I put in bold two words that stood out to me: 'ignorance' and 'redeem.' I ask the question as teachers, are we not redeemers? While we are certainly not the Redeemer, we redeem those from ignorance by teaching them. I know that I'm definitely stretching the meaning of these verses, but this is what came to me after reading them, and considering my teaching approach. I just cannot give up, because I am a redeemer, who leads others to our Redeemer.

Teaching is a way of redeeming others from destructive behaviors and downcast lives. Remember what the Gong book said multiple times? It talked about how many students' lives were changed because of a teacher (it also mentions this a few times in the Wong book). Their lives were changed. Their lives were redeemed from ignorance. We give knowledge and truth, which comes from Light, the Light of Christ. In a sense, we do God's work as teachers. Maybe we will not teach religion, or gospel principles, but the students will see it in the way we act, speak, and teach. Hopefully, they will see Christ in us.

That is why I cannot give up. I've got to try again, and this time, it'll be better.

Over the past week, I had the opportunity to teach others as well. Last week, for TEE 125, we had to design a website. Many, many people asked me questions about web design, especially trying to differentiate HTML from CSS. I was not frustrated, but I was happy; happy to help them learn how to make a website. I was not nervous, quiet, or teaching the computer, but I was teaching them. I'm not boasting here, merely giving an example of how my teaching has improved. So, I cannot give up. I cannot give up at all.

Reflection 5

High school is what I wanted to teach, yet before I went to Skyline this morning, I kinda had a dreadful feeling that the kids would make fun of us, or just me. I don't know why I thought this, because when we arrived the students cheered for us for coming from BYU. It's probably my paranoid side of me that always imagines worse case scenarios. Regardless, I felt welcome at Skyline today.

The class was fun to watch, I had no thoughts at the time that Alicia was teaching about my own teaching methods (I was trying to analyze hers). However, after the class left, I felt a little intimidated by Emily and the others because of their excitement for teaching. They seemed so... strong, so willing. I felt like I lacked that motivation. I don't understand why, but my motivation was not springing up like a magnificent fountain of everlasting water.

I'm not saying that I don't want to teach, but I don't think I have that level of enthusiasm for teaching. It worries me because I wonder if anyone in this major really needs that level of enthusiasm to be a good student, to be a good learner, to be a good teacher.

Emily asked me in the car what I wanted to teach. I told her I wanted to teach High School, probably something with Multimedia (web design, hopefully). I want to be able to teach what I love to do, and I love web design. I think it would do people good to learn web design since the internet is becoming more and more required in our lives. From what I can tell, Utah itself seems to be foolishly cutting web design out of its systems (Alicia told us that it had cut from the school programs, and there is no web design major at BYU. Just two to three classes on it.), which will create a problem in schools. I think if kids want to learn it, they should be allowed to learn it and no class should be cut off from them. This is a matter of necessity.

I will teach web design. Somehow, it all comes down to how I will play my cards.