Sunday, March 15, 2009

The curse of inexperience for a new teacher

We are about to finish our unit on Climate Change. My students have mixed understanding of what we are actually doing. I went about it by teaching the carbon cycle (photosynthesis, the carbon cycle, organic decay, and combustion). This week we are going to get into the greenhouse effect, which will actually get us to talking about climate change.

I have a pretty exciting week going, including experiments, watching an inconvenient truth, and having a debate (I still have to figure out exactly to make this accessible to my students).

The problem is this is a first, and I have no idea how its going to go over. I don't know if the students will learn anything. I don't know if the students will find it interesting. I don't know if this will be the week the students revolt. I'm doing little more then throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. I'm getting a little better, now that I'm teaching the same thing for the second semester, but its incredibly different teaching juniors and freshmen.

I feel that the way the day goes is based more on how my students are feeling then how well my lesson is designed. I don't have the skill, the ability, to greatly effect my students mood. I do it sometimes, but not with enough of the students and not enough of the time.

Baseball starts tomorrow, lets see how that changes some of those relationships...

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