The Lottery

I taught my first real lesson today! It was amazing. At first I was nervous because well I was finally going to teach and not just edit papers and help students do their study guides, but actually TEACH. I also kept hearing that a lot of bloc students were already teaching and I also felt behind (to jessica). The time will come. I was starting with a game called "The lottery," just like the short story I was going to teach today "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson. The winner, who was the student who received the folded brown paper with an X marked on it received 4 pride tickets which are tickets given by teachers that students could use in the school store, to vote for homecoming court etc. The winner was Brooke, she was awesome today and she even participated too. Well, just my luck, but now that I think of it, I am glad I got lucky today to have 3 observers watch me teach. The teacher across the hall had a bloc student from West Chester University who wanted to sit in on my co-ops class, but he forgot to tell him that it was me who was going to teach today. My co-op is phenomenal. I really got lucky with him. He pushes me to think beyond my limits, and experience the most I can while I can, especially now that I am still young. He works for CDT, which is a company that works for the keystone exams. He teaches faculty and other teachers how to use it, and how to read it. He teaches me and tells me that if his students are not where he thinks they should be, he is not doing his job. Anyway, the next two observers were Dr. Himilee, (misspelled) and my co-op of course. He was co-teaching with me at some points which made me feel like I was not alone up there in the front. The activity was pretty cool. After the winner was announced, they were given 25 minutes to read the short story while they anotate on the white board what they annotated on their paper. So Dr. Himilee took a picture of it with her cell phone, I should have too, it reminded me of our English class where we put all of our ideas on the board where we could see them all. Then I taught the lottery in a discussion form where I asked for a summary, and then we went through specifics, like names, subject, tone, mood, characters setting etc. It was nice. They went home with one assignment, to research who was Tessie Hutchinson (which I now know after doing so much research for this lesson plan) and Delacroix (two characters mentioned in this short story. One student came up to me while she was packing up her things and said, "great lesson." It felt good. (I think what felt great was teaching them things they did not know, because most have read this before, but questions like what the name Delacroix means...or what it even looks like, (a french word) meaning: of the cross," why would the author have it in the second paragraph, is that a hint of whats going to happen? I asked.