Everyman and Teachers

Today marked my last day of my practicum placement at BHS and I could not be sadder to be leaving. My TP and I were able to teach at least one class every day this week, and this was my first time teaching for a week straight! As I approached this week I was nervous and unbelievably anxious. The only thing that calmed my nerves was that my TP and I had interacted with our students and had the opportunity to teach them numerous times prior to this week. These were students that we made connections with and looked forward to observing and teaching. We taught a senior EEP class and we got to teach them the morality play Everyman. Our CT advised us to do some outside research about the play because these students were extremely intelligent and she wanted us to be as prepared as we could be. Thank goodness that we did our background research, because the questions these students asked were on such a high level of Bloom's Taxonomy.
For our first lesson, we had the students do a tea party to introduce them to the play. At first the students were hesitant because despite our assurances that they did not have to have read the play or be familiar with the characters to successfully engage in a tea party, they did not grasp this at first. This reluctance prompted my TP and I to further clarify how Everyman is an allegorical play and that the characters in the play embody their names (ex: Good Deeds is literally good deeds that are done). Once we clarified how allegory related to the characters/play they were much more eager to engage in this activity! It could not have gone better! The students were so creative with how they chose to embody their characters, for example one student was Confession and she told her peers that she was at a party with her friends and she played truth or dare, but she only chose truth and refused to choose dare. Another student was Beauty and he could be overheard telling his peers that he was "too pretty to play sports" and that he would rather look at himself in the mirror instead. The level of creativity that was displayed made me so happy and proud. For the next two days we had the students reading the play in class. After the first day, we noticed that the language in the play was an issue for the students. We had made frequent stops to check for comprehension, but we needed to do more to help the students with the play. Our second day of reading we passed our a vocab sheet to the students so that they could have the definitions of some of the commonly unknown words in front of them. I noticed that they had a much easier time with this.
On our fourth day of teaching, our professor came to observe us. It was on this day that we chose to have the students engage in a discussion in the literary salon that our CT had established. We had broken the students up into small groups of 4-5 students to have them first discuss the questions among themselves. Some students were absent on the previous day, so this was a great opportunity for them to be included and catch up on what they had missed. We then entered the salon and engaged in our discussion. These students had some amazing points that they wanted to make. One student compared this text to the two previous texts that were read in class! Reflecting back on this, I wish that my TP and I had stepped back a little and given our students just a little more control by not jumping in with our own comments as often. But overall, I loved how this went. The students posed some great questions to each other, everybody was respectful, and they took the discussion to levels that I could not have even imagined.
I did not want to leave today! Our students were sad to see us go and I was sad to be leaving. I have learned so much about myself as a teacher and what my strengths and weaknesses are as a teacher. I had previously thought that wait time was not something that I needed to walk on, but I was wrong! I learned how much planning goes into every single aspect of both planning and executing a lesson! But most of all, I learned that this is something that I REALLY want to do and love to do. Teaching is my passion and I have been very lucky to have had these opportunities at such an amazing placement!