Weekly Reflection #3

This week I learned how to successfully teach a lesson and do an activity with the class. The class that I did this with was the algebra one class because I have spent the most time with this group and I know all of the students really well. There was definitely a learning curve to making a presentation that accurately portrayed what I wanted to say in a way that would be easy for students to understand. There were lots of things that I did not think needed to be explained, but, in reality, they did. This week was probably my favorite week working at AEMS thus far. This week in all the classes the students seemed to feel more comfortable asking me questions. Due to the increase in questions, there were some that I could not answer in a way for the students to understand. In these situations, Michelle explains the problem to the student. While these moments are rare, I learn a lot every time it happens because, as I have come to realize, teaching a topic is a lot different than learning a topic. For the most part everything this week happened just as I expected it to. One surprise was when I was teaching my lesson, one of the slides had questions and answers, and the answers turned out to be completely wrong. I do not know why this happened as I checked the presentation over multiple times before I used it to teach the students. The only thing I can think of that caused this was when I projected the presentation, the formating of the presentation changed a little bit, which caused all the answer to shift around. I will benefit from this week’s activities because now I know how hard it is to be a good teacher. Being a good teacher is a lot more than being smart and knowledgeable on a subject, being a teacher is having the ability to share your knowledge with others in a way in which they can understand it. This is a skill that comes with experience, and even in my short time at AEMS, I noticed that I started to develop this skill more and more as the days passed. This week helped me achieve my main goal of teaching a lesson to the algebra one class. This was a goal from the beginning of the project because I felt like I could benefit from exposure to teaching because in the real world, there are many situations in which I may have to explain something in a different way, and teaching at AEMS has helped me develop this skill.
This week’s hours: 14
Total hours: 48.5

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