I think students more often than not take teachers for granted. It takes a lot of work and preparation to make an outline for a single session, not to mention an entire semester for several different classes. Weird to think of it now that I’ve tried it out – sort of. Then there is the presentation component of teaching, something students see every day but again, don’t appreciate. It’s a tough job, at any level.

I think if I learned anything from my experience at MUMS it was just that. I don’t really have much else to say about it. If I were to give pointers, I would say: 1. Be prepared (seriously though, know what and how you want to teach, allocate time, etc.) 2. Speak up and with enthusiasm, grasp the student’s attention. 3. Be confident, you run those kids, let them know who’s boss.

All in all, good experience. Something every student should try once.

So I went back to the hospital the other day to meet with the cardiologist. He listened to my heart and gave me another EKG. I can’t tell if I’m more or less worried about my heart after this appointment. The doc said that everything checked out fine, but there were two things that he was looking at, one of which worried him. My heart is dilated, its bigger than most other peoples’. Maybe thats just because I’m such a nice guy. Its much more likely because I’m a 260 pound, 6′ 4″ tall person who needs a bigger heart to pump blood through his massively oversized body. But I like to think its the first reason.

Doc actually said that he wasn’t worried about that, nor was he worried about my leaky valve. What worries him is that I still have a funky EKG. The fact that my first EKG and my most recent EKG have the same problem means that something is wrong and isn’t going away. So unfortunately I have to go get a cardiac MRI up in Burlington in December. Therefor I will remain on the shelf until then. Fear not, I will keep you all updated.

I never had any teaching experience before. Contrary to belief, I was really confident before class. I kept asking my partner Erin “why am I not nervous? I should be”. It wasn’t until that moment when I stepped into the classroom when I felt butterflies shoot up in my stomach.

I remember hating teachers at that age. During middle school, all I wanted to do was to skip class and go home. I had no passion for learning whatsoever and had no respect for any teachers. Seeing the kids in MUMS settled down for 30 minutes straight and actually listening to what Erin and me had to say was very impressive.

After couple minutes of messing about (we expected that) they settled down immediately. Thank god they were energetic and involved or else it would have been such an awkward class! I knew immediately that they were the energetic type because before I even started a kid already greeted me. That simple greeting gave me a new sense of confidence and I proceeded to make the class more energetic and fun.

They were very excited at the fact that they could actually collaborate with Google Docs, instead of just doing peer editing. As expected, some of the more rebellious kids started messing about with the prompt i.e changing the font size and type. Afterwards they did their task. I hate to admit it but I think they messed around less than us in the beginning. There were certain members in the DML class who just wouldn’t stop goofing around. At the end they did a solid job by producing a paragraph describing what good does Google Docs do to them.

On Friday, Will and I taught an 8th grade Computer Technology class about how to use social media sites to enhance learning.  But before I even talk about what the actual class time was like, I think it’s important to look at how we got there.  The planning process for this lesson was long and drawn out over several weeks, and it wasn’t until a few days before our class that we found an idea that we really loved.  I spent days trying to think of a cool way to engage the kids in the class, while still teaching them something valuable.  We had to remember so many factors: What if the kids didn’t use social media already?  How do we test that they understood what we just taught?  How do we keep them interested for 30 minutes?  So many questions running through my mind, but not enough ideas to help solve our problem.  On Thursday afternoon, however, we thought of something that suddenly made the whole project so much more exciting: we were going to bring a beach ball into class and have the students answer questions that were written on the ball.  What 8th grader doesn’t love throwing a beach ball at their friends?  Everything fell together with just 24 hours until our lesson, and I was honestly very excited.

So what did I learn from the teaching project at the middle school?

1. I learned that time goes by extremely fast when you’re teaching a lesson.  About halfway through the class, I started worrying that we would finish too early and have to come up with more activities.  But we finished our presentation with just 10 minutes to spare and our beach ball activity took up the rest of the time.  It was really surprising that everything passed so quickly but I’m glad we planned accordingly for the amount of time we had.

2. I learned that 8th graders are a lot more sneaky than I thought.  We gave the kids a poll to answer about whether they use Facebook or Twitter, and many people responded with “Neither.”  However, after talking to the teacher and walking around the room during discussions, it was evident that many more students used the sites than had reported so.  Additionally, one of the kids tried to convince me that he was born in my hometown, which isn’t very well known and also doesn’t have a hospital….so there’s that.  I work with middle schoolers at my summer camp, but I’ve never really experienced this level of ‘lying’ before.  I guess in that setting they don’t feel the need to be as deceptive as they are to new teachers in the classroom.

3. I learned the value of making sure that the students understand the material that was just taught.  When we did our beach ball activity, there were still kids that weren’t sure how to answer some questions.  We took advantage of those moments to reinforce what we had just taught and explain it in another way by relating it to the situation that was on the ball.  I think that’s one of the hardest parts of teaching — sometimes teachers get so caught up in how much they love a subject that they forget to make sure that their students are following everything that is going on.

Overall, it was a really fun experience planning a lesson and teaching in the middle school.  I’m planning on being a high school teacher, so I loved getting to work with kids again and starting to learn about what it takes to organize daily lessons.  Given the opportunity, I would definitely do this again.  Great experience.