Lesson Plans

The seminar this week as well as the lesson prep for the sixth graders has been a real eye opener. Now I know why every teacher that I have visited and talked to has told me to steal as many lesson plans as I possibly can. It takes a lot of work to write one from scratch and have it be good. Then there is always the test period where your first two periods have to be the dummies so you can get all the quirks out. A lesson plan that is already made and tested on students that you can tweak to your students specific needs sounds better and better every time we make one. One thing that Shum has done that has been really helpful is he had everyone is his class get a Dropbox account so that he could just put all his hand outs and power points there for us to take and save.

One thing that is comforting is that all the other teachers at the schools around where ever I end up will have had to go through the same thing already and will probably be more than willing to share around lesson plans to just make everyones life easier.

Something I believe Colin mentioned was to get a job now doing what you want to teach. This is something that I have always tried to do, sometimes with better luck than others, but it is very important. With having to have the work experience in order to get the endorsements you need to teach what you want to it becomes critical or you will end up teaching something else because there is someone else more qualified.

I also liked the idea of pretty much getting a lot of the first time teacher stress and problems over with during your student teaching. If you can put everything into it you will get everything out of it. Figuring out the working of a classroom and development of lesson plans for an entire class is something you can get a hold of while you have help. It sounds a lot better to me.

You know I think this becoming a teacher thing will work out.