JOANNE
PAYLING
Diary #20
Does
This Teaching Thing
Ever Get Any Easier?
Semester grades
are in. Half the year is gone. I am surviving and learning.
My naiveté is decreasing; I wish I could say my confidence is increasing. The certainty that haunts me is that I am not truly engaging half my students.
I am surviving this year, but not doing anything innovative, much less very exciting. There are moments when sparks of interest seem to ignite in my students' eyes, but more times than not, I see a glaze come over many of those orbs. How I wish I could report that I am a natural at matching content-standard lessons with dynamic and involving units.
Naively I thought Call of the Wild and A Christmas Carol were fascinating in their own right. Little did I know that today's students would consider the stories either too difficult to "get into" or boring. The idea that a wilderness, dog-eat-dog, survival story and a ghost story can be boring seems impossible to me. Okay, the stilted 19th century language is foreign to our 21st century students. I admit that. I can even rail at not having more modern literary choices to teach. Yet the fact remains, half my students are not engaged in their learning. What are wrong with my lessons that my students can feel this way?
I recognize that I am my own worst critic, but I am also a realistic critic. When I have time to think over the upcoming summer, I must determine how to better involve my students in these required units. There must be ways for them to interact with each other and with the readings so they can experience the power of the words they are perusing. In April when we start the dramatic version of The Diary of Anne Frank, we will assign parts and act out the story. I am hoping that will wake up some of my sleepers. And if it doesn't? Then I add that unit to my summer think fest.It seems that I am spending this year discovering a few small successes with ideas that work, and many areas of my teaching that can be improved greatly. No doubt a conscientious, experienced teacher would say that is true of every year of teaching. Every student is different, every class is different, and every year must be different. Discovering how to teach a lesson effectively and how to differentiate it to best reach all of my students is my goal this year, next year, and all the years I decide to teach.
I have to hope, though, that this task gets at least a little easier as the years go by.
