Lessons Taught, Lessons Learned

Hello, world! I have officially made it through the first week of my senior year at Penn State! Woo hoo!

Believe it or not, there is no such thing as "Sylly Week" in the Ag Ed world, we jump right in! In fact, during our first class on Monday, AEE 412: Methods of Teaching Agriculture, we were told that we had 48 hours to create a lesson which we would deliver to our peers on Wednesday morning. Oh, and our assigned topic was the one that we drew blindly from the pile!

I was immediately nervous and overwhelmed, wondering why the professors had to be so cruel and throw us right into the deep end like this. None the less, I drew my topic and sat down to figure out how on earth to conquer this task.

The topic I drew was time and my objective was to sway my peers into disagreeing with the following statements; time is money, time waits for no one, a stitch in time saves nine, and time is of the essence. My lesson was to be 15 minutes and include the pretest and posttest provided in the instruction packet.

I spent an admittedly long amount of time staring at my computer screen and turning up one useless Google search after another. Once I finally got into a groove I figured out how I wanted to conduct my lesson and came up with a few activities to go along with it.

To summarize, after having my students complete the pretest, we discussed instances in which our society must follow time as a concrete science. These examples included waking up, going to class, meeting people, etc all based on what time it was. Next, I asked them if there are any common phrases we use that would classify time as something less concrete. For example, when we say "time flies" we are implying that certain periods of time pass more quickly than others. These discussions got my peers thinking about their perceptions of time and led us into the first activity. I had the students close their eyes and silently count to twenty while I timed. This allowed students to see that everyone got to twenty at a different moment, showing that sometimes our perceptions of time are not correct. Finally, I had different quotes about the perception of time spread throughout the room and the students did a gallery walk and left a sticky note on the quote that stood out to them the most. After discussing why these quotes caught their eye and how they influenced their perceptions of time, the students took the posttest.

The quote that the most students selected as one that stood out to them.

Up until that point, everything had gone according to plan. I knew that my lesson hadn't been life changing or groundbreaking but it got the job done. As I announced that my lesson was complete, I realized two things. 1.) I had only used 2/3 of my allotted time, leaving 5 minutes remaining in 'class'. 2.) In the instructions for this lab was a learner satisfaction form that we were to make copies of and ask our peers to complete... I completely overlooked this step. As I sat down, I felt so defeated. It was our first teaching lab and I had completely ignored a huge portion of the assignment.

After reading over the comments our peers left us, we were asked to reflect on our personal 'gems and opps'. For those who aren't familiar, a gem is a positive aspect of our experience, something we did well at or shined in. An opp is an opportunity for growth, an area that we could have done better on. Personally, I felt that my gems included using relevant and engaging activities to interest my students as well as using a variety of instructional methods (discussion, lecture, hands-on, etc) to keep students engaged. For my opps, I felt that I could have done a better job of explaining specific terms or concepts throughout the lesson and of course, I should have read the instructions more carefully and come prepared.

As I've thought about my lesson the past few days, I have been fairly upset about forgetting the learner satisfaction form. I've been trying to plan what to write for this blog and all I could think about was that one mistake that I made. Then it hit me. As I was walking out to the parking lot this afternoon, I was thinking about that mistake when the Chris Tomlin song, Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone), came through my earbuds.

GRACE! I'm not giving myself grace! Think about how often in life we are given grace by others but we don't give it to ourselves. We make a mistake at work, in school, in a relationship, and the people in our lives are understanding of the fact that we are human. We forget things, we overlook things, we get overwhelmed with the craziness of our lives, we make mistakes. And when it comes down to it, we are so much harder on ourselves than anyone else. Now, I am not saying that showing up late to work three days a week or never doing the assigned reading is okay and deserves grace, that's habit, not mistakes. But yeah, when we are human and inevitably make a mistake, we need to give ourselves grace.

Dr. Foster gave us these for a reason!

This year is going to be really tough. I am going to be pushed and challenged and overwhelmed more than any time in my life. I am going to make mistakes. And that is okay. What is important is that after a bad lesson or a bad day, I pick myself up, understand where I went wrong, and learn from it, and then move on! Beating myself up and dwelling on the one small thing that I messed up on is not going to help me this year. Grace is going to help me and I am so glad that I was able to realize that now.

So, next time you feel like kicking yourself for being human, remember that mistakes are made, life happens, and grace is deserved by everyone.