Long day, beautiful end...

So I taught 3 lessons today, and man was it tiring.  3 lesson plans in one night paired with a 5 page focus paper calls for a hard days work.  It felt good though.  I taught all day, and it seems like I did a pretty decent job at it.  It was quite humbling.  I love being a teacher so far.  I love being in control of a classroom.  I love being the facilitator of various discussions.  I love lecturing.  I love asking questions and staring at them for 30 seconds encouraging them to give me the right answer.  Most importantly, I love teaching.  I hate not sleeping, but that is a whole other story.  I love the people in the program.  First years and second years.  I feel as if we are all on one big team trying to win...  At what you might ask.  Succeeding.  Succeeding in the fact that we are at least helping others.  We may not be teaching them enough to pass their next year of school, and we may not be teaching them enough to go to college straight out of high school, but I think we are teaching them more than what they have been previously been taught.  A lot of discussion has arisen in our ed class of what an effective teacher is.  My answer:  As long as you are helping the students.  Yeah, we are being observed and a lot of pressure is put on each of us to do well.  We are expected to have pitch perfect lesson plans, involving sets (introductions), and comprehensive closures, but the main point, in my opinion, is that you have got to teach the student better than their previous teachers.  A lot of focus, or discussion, has been around the fact that teaching is student centered.  "Spend 10 minutes talking and giving directions, then give the students an assignment, and let them learn the content for themselves."  Now, I don't disagree with this, but I do have an opinion.  Lazy teachers give worksheets.  They only give worksheets.  Then, they sit at their desk and answer a few questions while grading their papers and acting busy for the rest of the day/period.  I am a lecturer.  Not in the sense that I like to give moral lessons to people until I turn blue in the face, but in the sense that I love to tell stories.  Maybe history is an easy subject for this approach to be effective, but it is my "style".  Yes, I give assessments, but as I remember, students in my high school goofed off and unconsciously answered the questions on worksheets only to get by.  I learned, and was later inspired by, my favortie teachers that could take a boring subject and turn it into an hour long movie script.  It was entertaining, educational, and most importantly, it kept my attention.  It got me interested in the subject/lesson.  It made me think about it later in the day, and that is what I call effective.  If a student goes home, and later thinks about something that you taught him/her, then you have succeeded.  You have taught them something.  Whether it is a simple reference to something taught in class at the dinner table with family members, or if it is an inference to something that they later watch on tv, it is education nonetheless.  So everybody calm down, don't stress out over your lesson plans, and don't simply give the students a worksheet and think that they will learn something.  Do your job.  Teach.  Talk.  Inform.  Ask questions.  We know more than they do fellow first-years, trust me.  Keep up the good work!

This is how the day ended.  After a hellacious rain, this appeared.  Ahhh a day of accomplishments.