Lesson Plans

Never have I ever taken an education class, but from the sound of it, I wouldn't like it.  It's all "This is the best way to teach a student," "These are the rules," "You must teach to this test," "I am big and administrative and will frighten you with the threat of withholding tenure!"  Sounds miserable, particularly since the professors teaching education have generally been absent from elementary and secondary education for a while.

Anyhow.

I'm playing with an English teacher at the moment - for a story, not in real life - and I realized that the way I prepare presentations, or imagine teaching (which, yes, I do sometimes) is by practicing the story of the event before it happens.  I simply imagine all the things that could go right, try them out and then add all the things that could go wrong and see how imaginary me would cope.  Sometimes I can't cope; sometimes I come out super human.  In writing this character, though, I realized that the act of writing out a scene taking place in a classroom is one of the better ways to practice teaching when you can't get into a classroom yourself.  The teacher doesn't have to be you, they can be bold where you are terrified, gentile where you would want to smack a student upside the head, and suffer while you calmly write them into a disaster.

To make my character make sense, I decided I needed to actually spend some time with some of the texts I wanted him to discuss, makes sense, no?  And while I flipped through a few books of poetry, I jotted down potential assignments he could give his students, my other characters, based on those poems.  Essentially, I began designing a whole unit on poetry.  But writing these scenes requires more than just coming up with fun lesson plans.   If I want the content of the classroom to bear on the rest of the story, I also have to write out student responses!  I have to DO my own assignments!  Which seems right to me; I will soon find out if they are terrible or not simply in the enactment.  Perhaps they do this in education classes, but I have yet to hear of an Education major being required to complete the assignments they themselves design.

Maybe it is the perpetual English major in me that is excited to generate and do homework for the sake of a more realistic story, but I think I've stumbled upon something fun, challenging, and helpful here.

Poetry, apparently you inspire me.  Who knew.