My Teaching Experiences

Well, I'm done in K----'s class. I feel such a sense of finality with it...I'm done with my whole unit, I said good-bye to the kids, I've said good-bye to K----, I packed up all the stuff I had in my desk, I turned in grades...It just feels like I'm done....Which is going to make it even more difficult to return next week and start all over in T----'s class.

I feel like the unit went pretty well. These are some of the small things I hope my students have been able to take from the unit:

TKAM

* Mayella Ewell was NOT a slut, whore or a prostitute. She was a lonely, neglected young girl whose father probably beat her. In trying to seduce Tom, she was merely looking for a friend, trying to feel connected to somebody.

* Tom Robinson did in fact have a left arm. He couldn't use it, but he did still have an arm.

* The character of Dill, even though developed from the author's life-long friend Truman Capote who is homosexual, is not necessarily gay. We actually know nothing about Dill's sexuality other than that he wants to marry Scout when he's around eight-years-old.

* The mockingbird is a symbol for multiple characters including (but not necessarily limited to) Tom, Boo, Atticus and Jem.

* Calpurnia was not a housewife. Atticus was a lawyer. Miss Maudie did not gossip. Dill lied about being abused.

* Lynching someone was worse than just beating them up or threatening them to make them afraid of you.

Of couse, on top of that, I want them to understand the basic storyline, know the characters, recognize the symbols, and feel some connection to the novel, but when it comes down to it, these are the things that were most difficult for most students to comprehend. At first, I was really worried about the book and how the students were or were not comprehending it. However, the more we got into it and the more work I did with it, the more it appeared to me that they were interested in the book. They were excited to watch the movie, they talked about the book before and after class, they became better able to act like the characters and respond for the characters and they did better on quizzes (on the last quiz I gave, all but five students in seventh period received an A on the quiz). I definitely feel success with this unit.

Something else I felt success with was the memoir projects. I had students write a short memoir from both their own perspective and then from the perspective of someone else involved in the memoir. Then, they had to put both story lines into a book. Most students did very well on this assignment. Some students put obvious extra effort into at home. They turned the memoirs in on Monday and in every period Tuesday they asked if I had them all read yet. I had to disappoint them and tell them that it would probably take me the entire week to read and grade the memoirs from all 140 students who turned one in. I enjoyed reading them, for the most part. I found that many students poured themselves into this project and what I received was beautiful. I would definitely want to do this project again, but in the future I wouldn't want to split up the work days. I would to the entire project by itself for one week. The way I did it - split up over a couple days during the second half of the quarter - was too disjointed.

Overall, this quarter was a success. Like I said, it will be difficult to start all over next week since I currently have the feeling of being finished with something, but I suppose I'll trudge through it on my way to graduation. (I think it wouldn't be so difficult if I was staying in the same classroom, incidentally, because I wouldn't have this feeling of finality yet.) I will miss my ninth graders, but I'm sure I'll grow to know and love the eighth graders just the same.