September 25-29, 2006 Observation

September 25, 2006

The focus of this week seems to be a combination of having the students think about their arguments from every angle and citation. The students spent some time working with google, databases in the library and dogplie/metacrawler.com. I found it really helpful for the students to do productive research in class while learning how to evaluate sites. In the second class the students learned the importance of having the correct website. The students were asked to go to www.martinlutherking.org and a few students went to www.martinlutherking.com and the site happened to be a site promoting sex. The students were surprised at how biased the Martin Luther King site was; what seemed like an informative site turned out to be a website developed by the KKK.

The second activity in the class worked extremely well. The students looked at each other’s computer screens and made comments such as what other counter arguments could be, questions on information that needed clarification and other points to think about. The students seemed to really a. enjoy the activity and b. gain useful information from it. 

September 27, 2006

Today was my first day of teaching. I was a little nervous in both classes, but worse in the first class. I feel bad for the students in the first class; I know I was talking fast since I was nervous. I did not like the set up in the classroom; I had a powerpoint and felt separated from the students since the teacher station is in the corner and I couldn’t walk around a lot. In addition to talking fast I also went through my slides pretty fast, not spending a lot of time of the actual information.  I forgot my list of questions that I wanted the students to think about as they were working on their worksheet that I created for them. The worksheet seemed to go over very well. The students were able to take what I tried to teach and apply it right away. I did not interact as much as my mentor did when the students were working on the worksheet. My mentor said that I did not talk as fast as I thought I was and that I had authority in my voice and did well. I still think the second class went better. I liked the setup in the room better since I could walk around a little bit as I was lecturing. I asked more questions during my lecture and interacted with the students a little more. I remembered to ask the questions and I think the students understood counterarguments better than the first class. I really liked the fact that the students were re-explaining what I taught to their classmates that did not seem to get it when I said it. I felt accomplished after the second class.

September 29, 2006

The students went back to working with research sources and also started to talk about paragraph development. I like how my mentor is bringing in some topics that the students had trouble with in the first papers. She decided the slow down the second paper to spend some extra time on paragraph development, citation and grammar. The students do not seem to find this to be the most exciting information but no matter where in the semester it fell, would it be exciting. I think a lot of students feel like they already know this from high school, but now they need to work on making it more college level. The students used their Penguin handbook to work with paragraphs and then took some of those ideas and tried to apply them to their topics. I really like the connection with teaching the students style and structure issues and them having the students directly apply that to their new paper topics. I am really interested to see the change between the first papers and the second papers.