A Measure of Success and Possible Failure

Although it was probably a crazy time for me to think that I should teach 8th graders, I created and taught a lesson the Thursday before Spring Break.  And surprisingly enough, it went well!  I'm sure it was partly because they got to leave the room and go to the library for part of the day, but I like to think I included a little pizzazz in there on my own.  I got to interrupt the "Test Prep" unit with a lesson about how real readers choose books--I decided to talk about getting recommendations, mostly from friends, but from teachers as well.  I think that it's important to emphasize that they're honing their reading and choosing skills not just for the classroom, but for all their years beyond school.  Real readers depend on their friends and colleagues, and even websites, to give them recommendations about what they should read.  I taught two classes, and I realized from the first class that it would be better to model the recommendation with a real person.  This seems like a "duh" thing, but sometimes I forget to use the resources that I have in the room.  If I'm asking them to do partner work, it makes much more sense for me to not play both partners.  It's even confusing to read that sentence.

Anyway, there was exciting chatter in the classroom about the books that they've already read and why they think their group members should check out a certain book.  I forget that whenever you decide that you like something, you feel like everyone else should like it too, so there's a built-in desire to tell people about what you like.  They brought post-it notes with three suggestions to the library, and they spent their time actually hunting down books to read.  I loved that even in the library, students were recommending certain titles with me (I had shared my recommendation of Matched, which is a book that they're familiar with).  And, as always, the library and the librarian are amazing, so it was a really fun class period.

Those are the lessons that seem full of life and fairly easy to plan.  It seems like that's in stark contrast to my whole class text unit plan, which was a little painful and really hard to work out.  I'm sure it's because I end up working on assignments where I feel like I'm inventing the wheel, but I ended up choosing a text that isn't commonly taught at this point.  Also, in working out my plan, I was not only creating assignments from scratch, I was attempting to find all these other examples of texts to include in the unit.  I'm a little worried that I tried to do too much in the unit, but I tried to keep in mind that I specifically planned it out for 11th graders, so I think they should be able to handle it.  (And that's another problem--I was making up an audience rather than thinking of one I'd been working with.  I just decided that I couldn't envision the current classroom I'm in doing a whole class text.)  In addition, I tried to work in a lot of group work so that they wouldn't feel overburdened individually, but we'll see.  I'm sure it's one of those things that I'd have to be in the thick of to decide what to weed out and what to keep.  Once again, I have discovered that lesson planning is really, very, extremely tough.