Caution: Long Blog Posting Ahead

Before we begin, I just want to give everyone a heads up that this is going to be a pretty dry posting about the theory behind my first unit of teaching, so if your looking to be entertained, may I suggest you go here instead.

Well week two is in the bag! With the exception of the odd bump in the road (man, field trips and school concerts can just DESTROY your lesson plans!) my unit on the Cuban Missile Crisis went off without a hitch.

As I only had one class, I found myself with quite a lot of time to really pine over my plans and make sure they were bulletproof on a theoretical level. One thing UVIC really does quite well is fill your head with an arsenal of teaching lingo which you can call upon when the time comes. So when my supervisor came to check out the class, I pretty much hosed him down with jargon-filled, over the top lesson plans. Poor guy didn't know what hit him.

Anyways, the lesson was pretty standard really. It was all built to Bloom's, and so the first day was pretty basic geography, names and dates. Then on the next day we ran an ol' Zero Sum Game to deduce what could have transpired in the crisis. The ladies really over-thought this exercise I felt, which is definitely something to consider in future planning, but they got the big idea in the end. The next day I tracked down the EXComm meeting minutes and arranged them into a sort of play. I assigned the ladies different personalities to take on (ie JFK, McNamara, RFK) and we read through it dramatically together. I was JFK and busted out my best impression (thanks Clone High!) which they really liked. It worked so great! Everyone of them is ESL, but they picked up on all the subtleties and nuance in the speaker's words and again, fully nailed the concepts I was going for.

I couldn't have been happier with the hand I was dealt for my first week of teaching. I made one massive faux-paus infront of them, which they called me on instantly. Did you know the capital of Turkey ISN'T Istanbul?! I would have bet my bottom dollar on that one! Ankara?! Man, I am looking at google maps right now and I still don't believe it.

So now I know that I can really push these ladies mentally. Next week is 'Human Demographics' for my grade 9's and we will be analyzing a really cool art film called Koyaanisqatsi to determine what push/pull pressures we can see placed on the society depicted in the movie. I am going to have my grade 8's read a chunk of Art Spiegleman's hit comic (or 'authentic text' as we high-falutin' teachers call it) Maus to learn about the early phases of the Holocaust. All in all... I am really, really liking this gig!

Anyways, thanks for sticking it out through this one!
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