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.