Life Knowledge Lesson

To set the stage, I was incredibly excited to get to teach again.  Last week at Central Mountain had my blood pumping and adrenalin up.  I was ready!  However, I will admit that I wasn't as excited about teaching my topic this time!  The students started the day by having New Castle School of trades in to talk about higher education and the program they have to offer.  Most of the students at Mohawk are repeaters meaning they take more than 1 Ag class per day.  I was to teach the last 2 periods of the day about resumes.  The idea was to make it a career oriented day!  Having a degree in business, I have wrote many resumes and have a pretty good grasp on them.  Thus content knowledge wasn't a problem.  Although, excitement and interest was!  I knew this going into the lesson and hoped to capture it.

As I said I taught 2 classes, these 2 classes couldn't have been any more different!!  The first class consisted of 35 kids, which was the combination of both Mr. Wallace's students and Mr. Schirmer's classes.  This class  was crowded and there were not enough seats, however they were engaged.  They were interested in what I was talking about and since they were primarily juniors and seniors they could easily see why they needed to learn this.

 We started class with the question, "What do you need for an interview?"  The students quickly engaged and I got a lot of good answers.  We then did an  E-moment for the interest approach and had the students draw pictures of 8 skills they had.  This activity was only to take a maximum of ten minutes to draw and share.  However, it took quite a but longer... The students struggled to come up with skills they possessed, I took this opportunity to talk about the plethora of skills that even a young child possesses.  This seemed to spark their minds and they started to draw.  We then discussed the skills in a think-pair-share fashion. 

I then worked through a notecard card activity that basically put their entire resume on a 3x5 card!  Cool activity and tons of great information, but even though 3x5 was the recommended size it was not near big enough!  I would definitely buy the larger notecards if I do this lesson again!  We worked through the notecard and powerpoint presentation and at that got us to the end of class.  I assigned the students the task of doing a resume for homework, I passed out a template but challenged them to try to use a word template instead!

Overall I was happy with the first class and super excited to teach the lesson to a smaller group of students.  Due to the size of the previous class some of the group activities were hard to manage and due to time I wasn't able to do all of them.  The second class however, wasn't near as excited to see me as I was to see them!!  I came at them hard with the value of the lesson and why a resume benefits them... But it was no use they would not give me their attention.  They were all freshman and after the lesson Mr. Wallace and I discussed the class they were primarily IEP students.  He said that they are always that way and that they are his greatest challenge.  There were 5 of the ten students engaged and trying to participate.  I can say they push every one of my buttons and several times I had to yell just to get them to hear me instead of their neighbor.  After the group activity I put them back in different seats didn't help....  We did get through all the material but I never used my PowerPoint because I was afraid to take my eyes off them.

 

After a few days to reflect it was a learning experience and I have an entire list of things I would do if it were my class!  However, I can happily say that class will not be there in the spring its only a half year class!!!! Huge relief! Mr. Wallace told me afterward that he only had me teach that class to give me the experience of dealing with students like that.  He said he figured if I was exposed to them now I could make my list of ways to handle those behaviors for spring, check list made!!  Just to give you a clear picture of what they were acting like, when asked to draw their skills one students skill involved a magazine, bottle of lotion and Kleenex!!!  Seriously?!?!?