2001-01-30
Lead Teaching, Day Two, posted at 18:36:43
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com Teaching is hard.After almost two full days of lead teaching, I find I'm exhausted and preparing day to day rather than a week ahead like I wish I was.
My tenth grade class is noisier than last semester. I lost some quiet students, and gained some noisy ones. I taught a day on satire today, preparing them for "Huck Finn," and it went really well - until the end. I spend the first part of the hour going over political cartoons, some articles from theonion.com, and clips from Michael Moore's "TV Nation" and "Saturday Night Live." Then, I messed up bad with my last clip. I had more time than I thought I did, and played a clip I hadn't previewed in about a week. It was from Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show," and was a short snippet satirizing the Golden Globes. It was going really well, but then there was a penis joke. Oops. I didn't turn it off on time. Boy, did I feel dumb. I tried to play it off by saying the class would be having sex ed. in the class in a couple of weeks anyway (which is true... they're taking over English classes for a week for sex education).
Otherwise, things are going well. My Seniors, I hope, dug the opening to "Catcher in the Rye" (which included a clip from the Will Smith movies "Six Degrees of Separation", a printout of my friend Kelly's e-mail, and a mini-lecture on Salinger's life and the cultural phenomenon that "Catcher" has become).
Going to bed at 11pm and getting up at 4:45am really sucks, though. I'm trying to get myself in bed earlier, but I gain a second wind late in the evening for some reason - either that, or someone calls, or knocks, or what not. Very tired, though.
But life is good.