Well today didn't go quite as smoothly as yesterday, but I managed. I was teaching my kids about subtracting negative integers (something I struggled a lot with when I was learning) and I confused two of the examples on my lesson plan. I didn't catch it right away, so I am showing them these examples on the number line and how to find the answers, and one of my girls who is clearly the top of my class, says, "wait, that doesn't make any sense." I stop, look, and reply, "J., you're right, that's totally wrong!" I was mortified, but thanked her for catching it, gave her an extra "bonus ticket" (drawn from a bucket at the end of the week for prizes), and told my students when, not if but when, they catch me in mistakes to speak up. I think, in retrospect, I played it off ok, but I was so embarrassed at the time. It was one of those days for a lot of us. Amanda had a second grader correct her place value, and Gary had an 8th grader correct him on the difference between the New Jersey and the Virginia plans (think back to early American history). Whew...I was ready for today to be over. My kids did ok on their assessments at the end of class, so they clearly managed to learn anyway, despite their teacher!
Lots of lesson planning tonight, I am hoping this gets easier as time goes on, because figuring out how to teach new material, practice it and assess it each day in 50 minutes is very, very hard. Though I don't suppose I joined TFA for a cushy job.
Check out this YouTube video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxsOVK4syxU). It brought tears to my eyes and then made me think, "hell yeah I'm a teacher" and want to go and push my kids as hard as I can. It will make you all want to be teachers!
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Katie
ReplyDeleteWhat a great video. I have forwarded it to several teacher friends here at work. I think they will love it.
As for making mistakes, that is what we call learning. It is all in how you handle it - sounds like you handled it perfectly!