Those oh-so-anticipated “teachable moments” -- Kare

I am excited to say that I am now an official “student teacher.” While the first few days were challenging, they were also exciting, motivating, and, of course, insightful learning opportunities. I have learned about the challenge that is co-teacher collaboration and how to be flexible in the classroom.

Day 1: I introduced The Great Gatsby, our main unit text, by way of discussing the parallels between Fitzgerald’s life and his fiction. Lesson 1: students care far less about Fitzgerald’s college literary magazine and football dreams than I do! As a teacher, it is challenging to balance your personal love and interest in literature and learning with what your students are reasonably inspired and capable of exploring.

Day 2: I used the universal appeal of $$$ to attract student attention. The students discussed money and high/low society in The Great Gatsby…and they really got into it! I was so pleased to see every student talking and finding what I considered “slippery” quotations from the text to explore the concept of money and class. I am, however, in a unique situation in that my class is not all mine. In fact, it is not even shared by me and my cooperating teacher. No, I share a class with another student teacher and two cooperating teachers. Lesson 2: be open and flexible. To make a long story short, I felt like I had to stop my first-ever teachable moment because the clock told me to hand over the reigns to my history student teacher counterpart. I understand that teaching is being flexible, but I wish that this flexibility was driven by the STUDENTS and not by scheduling and a shared classroom. My goal now is to somehow figure out ways to develop these “teachable moments” in finite scheduled-ahead time blocks. More to come on this…