Week 5 Reflection

This week has flown by! I am happily getting more and more comfortable with teaching every day. I am becoming much better at lesson planning and preparing for classes in general. Even the best laid plans go wrong and it has been really important to remain flexible from day to day and class to class.
In forensics this week we covered handwriting analysis and ink chromatography. I found that students liked analyzing their own handwriting to see what it said about their personalities. After the first class I realized that I needed better examples and quickly adjusted for the rest of the day. I feel bad that the first group of the day is always a "test run" of sorts. I feel like the last class of the day almost always goes the best because I have practiced all day. This was also somewhat the case with our chromatography lab today. My host teacher helped me to change plans quickly when my morning "test runs" didn't work out and it was very much appreciated! He's good at thinking on his feet and can almost always help me with last minute decisions and changes. I guess this is something that comes with experience. I was initially afraid that the lab would be too complicated for many of my students, but they actually responded very well to the challenge. I think I may actually be making the class too easy for many of them and they become bored and stop paying attention. I'm going to try and challenge them more with the topics and the types of activities that they participate in.
Anatomy was interesting this week. I gave their 2nd test today and, which many students improved, many grades also dropped from the last exam. It was frustrating to see that so many students still couldn't answer some of these questions on topics that we have covered for weeks now. I felt like I really prepared them for this test. I think tomorrow I am going to try assigning seats. Too much talking and not paying attention takes place during class. While they might hate me for it at first, I think that they will benefit from it in the long run. We'll see how it goes and i'll report back next week! We are also starting a longer, more difficult chapter next week so I hope that I am able to learn everything that I need to successfully teach it. At least the weekend is almost here and I will have some prep time! (and family visiting time this week!)
That's all for now :-)