Teaching Middle School: A Pre-Teaching Entry

I would like to start this blog post off by saying I'm nervous to teach the middle school class that my TP and I have been observing for the past couple weeks. I am nervous that the students won't respond well to us, as we have not formed any bonds with them (except for a couple students who we have seen in classes other than the one we are teaching). Our first two lessons require a lot of student participation and if they don't accept us or respond well to us, then are they still going to participate? We'll find out. 

I am nervous about executing wait time (one of my biggest weaknesses as a teacher!) but I'm excited for another opportunity to practice (after all, practice makes perfect!). I think that this time, I am more aware of the fact that I need to work on my execution of wait time, so hopefully this awareness is the first step to becoming good at it! 

One of the things that I am NOT nervous about, however, is our lessons. My TP and I have planned some really good lessons that we think will captivate the attention of the students as well as help them use their prior knowledge to build upon the knowledge that they will learn! We are teaching them Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Tell Tale Heart" and relating this story to building suspense and knowledge of unreliable narrators. Planning this was a little hard for my TP and I, simply because our background knowledge of suspense and unreliable narrators was from texts that the students would not have read or media that was not age appropriate for the grade level we were teaching (for example: Holden Caulfield or the shower scene from Psycho). 

We want the students to go home on Friday of this week, having read "The Tell Tale Heart" and understanding it on a deeper level of "an old guy was killed because a guy didn't like his eye". It is through the instruction on building suspense and an introduction to an unreliable narrator that we plan to get to this deeper level of comprehension. Wish me luck!