Tuesday’s person of the week. (A little late)

This week’s person of the week is actually several people of the week. They are the 27 fourth graders I just taught my first math lesson to. They were wonderful. They listened while I read a book about estimation, they participated in an activity I had planned, they completed a hand out, they shared their findings with the class, and finally they wrote about their experience in a paragraph. T he lesson took about an hour and it was exhilarating. There were moments when I had to reign in the discussion to keep them on track and to remind them to be polite and listen as each group shared. I also had to remind then that writing a paragraph was a quiet activity. For the most part they were cooperative and engaged in the lesson.
The feed back I received from the students as to whether or not they enjoyed the lesson was very positive. One student said I was an awesome math teacher another said I rocked. They both got excellent grades on their papers. Two students didn’t like it so much because the activity did get a little loud. All in all it was fun and I owe it all to the wonderful fourth graders and one awesome teacher who has the most incredible classroom management skills I have ever seen. She runs a tight ship but a fun ship. I want to be a teacher like her someday. I am looking forward to the next math lesson I teach. I think I will try something different and not do an activity but teach a concept, model it, give them guided practice, and then independent practice. I have not taught a lesson like that yet and I am curios to see how different it is to teach an activity versus a more traditional lecture type lesson.
I even had papers to grade. That was harder then I thought. I was using a rubric cube to grade the paragraph; their participation, the hand out I gave them, and whether or not they came up with a reasonable estimation. It was easy to grade the estimation, their participation and whether or not they completed the work sheet, but the paragraph was much harder. You want to be fair, but you have to be truthful as well.
This was a much better experience then the last lesson I taught in social studies. The teacher for the past class did not preview the lesson with me before the lesson as this teacher did. I thought this was a great help to me. The social studies teacher did not critique my performance other then to say I did a great job. This teacher took copious notes while I taught and she will go over them with me tomorrow while the students do their AR reading. I am looking forward to hearing what went right and what I can do better. All in all it was a tremendous learning opportunity from planning the lesson, gathering the material, presenting the lesson and assessing their efforts. I think I am going to like teaching.