The First Day

The first day. It carries feelings of nervousness, excitement, and memories of years past. But what does the first day look like for a teacher? This week in lab we put ourselves to the test and prepared a lesson for the first day of class. We had ten minutes and were asked to do introductions of the course and ourselves, get to know the students, and go over expectations for the year. I was initially nervous, but the further into my planning I got, the more excited I became.

Overall, I thought that my lesson went very well and I was pleased with how everything worked out. I felt that I came in prepared with my lesson and equipped to teach it and I felt that I handled most of the hurdles that came my way. Two things that I struggled with were timing and classroom management.

On the timing aspect, I felt awkward because I was rushing my students through the activities to ensure that I covered everything in my given ten minutes. While I know that this dynamic will be a bit different in the classroom, I am hoping to improve on my understanding of how to plan out the timing as well as knowing in the moment how much time is passing and when I need to move on.

Classroom management was another fun hurdle to overcome. Each of my peers was assigned the role of a student and was asked to portray them, I was working with a sleepy student, a teacher's pet, a whiner, and a student who was distracted by their phone. I did my best to handle each situation as it

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arose and I feel that I did a fairly good job. The toughest part was keeping the students engaged without allowing the distraction of classroom management to break my stride. I did this mostly by moving around the room and standing near students when they were causing a problem. For the sleepy student and the student on her phone, I simply asked them a question directly, gently touched their shoulder, or quietly asked them to focus, all while I continued instructing. The part that I really struggled with here was knowing when I had reached the point that I needed to further address the problem. My thought was that if I openly addressed the issue in front of the class, it would create more of a distraction in the long run so I tried to handle the situations quietly and without disturbance. I think that as time goes on I will learn to gauge when it is okay to quietly manage on the side and when I need to stop teaching and address it more directly.

Overall, I was happy with my work this week and was excited to get a feel for how we will be conducting our labs over the next few months. I know that classroom management skills will come with time and I am glad to be able to begin getting these questions out of the way now.