Thursday, May 31, 2007

Post Train-wreck rumination

After a sweltering day, battling pollen and humidity, I'm left picking up the pieces of an afternoon gone bad. It started with the best of intentions--demonstrating for students the difference between Thick and Thin questions.
Without getting into the gory details, let's just say, I caught the teacher's attention and said something about the bottom falling out of this lesson. She concurred. At that point I told the kids that sometimes teachers make mistakes and at that point we collected up the remaining sentence strips and started in again more intelligently. The unfortunate reality was that my time was almost up.
With just 2 minutes to spare, I hit the next room...another second grade class. I told that teacher how horrible the previous lesson had gone and that I needed a minute to regroup so that we (meaning I)don't make some of the same mistakes. This lesson went better, the mini-lesson was pretty solid, but after coming back from reading and sharing questions, I again (as if I didn't learn the first time)couldn't seem to help them categorize the questions they had from their own book into Thin versus Thick. The problem was that without a shared reading experience, we, as a class, couldn't ascertain this. So, now I'm finding myself in need of more coaching so I can address this, an area I felt fairly confident with, in a more appropriate way.
I love days like this because they make me think, but I hate them, too, because they make me feel like a buffoon. All in all, I guess it's good to be kept humble, lest we stop growing. I grew a lot today,and will continue to grow as I reflect on "what now?"