TEAM Self-Evaluation

17 July 2006

I think a lot of the criticisms I have of this lesson are pretty similar to those of the lesson I taped at Holly Springs, which is understandable and a little discouraging. I still want my lessons to move at a quicker pace when I'm at the board. I need to get what I want said out there and stop dancing around what I need to say. The longer I'm up there, the more restless the students will get. I shouldn't be wasting any of the time I'm up at the board.

That said, I don't think I was up there for too long before the class split into groups. Obviously, group work in this setting is a whole different species than what I will have to face in the Delta, so it's hard to glean much from that either.

I have to do a better job of making sure all my directions and instructions are clear and given before I hand out any of the papers or allow the students to move into groups. In this case, I got away with it. In the real thing, I would've been floundering about repeating myself and wasting everyone's time. I'll work on that I suppose.

What I think a lot of this boils down to, and a lot of what I've been thinking about recently, is KISSing. Keeping It Simple, Silly/Stupid/Suffering-Succotash. I think I've come to accept that, yes, I can't do everything from the beginning. You're right (Ben and others, cough, Battery, cough) I won't be able to have 12" voices and group work and fun and whatever else I have envisioned in my little head. (I don't mean for this to steer too far from evaluation, but I think the video was so woefully unrealistic that watching it didn't really gain me much other than focusing these most recent thoughts).

So, maybe I will have to take it for the team here and be a little militant to begin with. I'll still make incessant jokes and smile but all while dishing out warnings and copying assignments like lollipops at the bank. What I can't do, is let go of the socratic/inductive bent in my teaching. I would get too bored and, ultimately, feel like I was lying to the kids about Math and English. So, I think my classes will all be about building. Building the math/reading basics that the kids probably don't really have yet while building a classroom climate where we can get work done. Maybe neither of those will never make it much into the hands of the students, but that'll be the implicit aim.