Teaching Pt. 2

(Subtitle: Hot Curlers - A Cautionary Tale)

After reading the responses from other teaching groups, I must admit I was terrified about this week's assignment.  Getting a grade 8 class interested in history seemed like a daunting task at the outset of the semester; finding testimonials detailing students' complete disengagement with the material or unabashedly rude behaviour made a class about Confederation seem utterly impossible.  I didn't know how to react to any of the behaviours I had heard about.  To use an old metaphor, how was I supposed to get horses to drink when they didn't even want to go near water?

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised when we arrived at the school though.  It was a setting so far removed from the high school we visited last week: noisier, more chaotic, and more exuberant.  Maybe it was the fact that we arrived just before recess.  I don't know.  Either way, the school was a flurry of activity, and I found myself get caught up in it.  What had seemed like such an impossible task before didn't seem to scary facing a hallway of students ready for recess.  Actually, it seemed like a lot of fun.

Once again, I had a great time being in front of students and delivering my monologue.  I think the costume helped - a friend of mine was good enough to lend me a period dress for the occasion, one I paired with appropriately subdued make-up and curled hair, because all late-19th century women wear subdued make-up with curled hair in my imagination.

(A short digression here, if I may, about hair curling: over the years, I've become a bit of a curl connoisseur.  Calling my hair flat is an understatement of epic proportions.  It falls at inverted obtuse angles over my head, and there is nothing - NOTHING - I can do about it, least of all when it's long, because longer hair is even less likely to hold a particular style.  Now, having a very good curling iron has solved this problem, but curling hair with an iron on one's own is an arduous task.  My hair is shoulder length, and it's still a half-an-hour endeavour, sometimes more.  I knew I wanted to wear my hair in curls for teaching though, so I borrowed a set of hot curlers from my mother's house and didn't test them first.  This proved to be a very stupid idea.  I didn't have enough curlers to cover my whole head, and the curlers weren't hot enough to actually curl my hair, so in the end, I wasted a half-an-hour putting the curlers in and then spent another twenty minutes with my curling iron correcting all my mistakes.  Worse, the curls were gone in less than half a day, and I missed breakfast.)

Ahem - back to teaching:

My activity was a little more successful this time around as well.  I offered the students in my group a scenario to illustrate just how many people were forgotten by Confederation: imagine that Los Angeles, California was going to confederate and become its own, independent nation.  Who would be present at the signing of Confederation?  I offered them thirty pictures of pop culture icons like Justin Bieber and the cast of Twilight and asked them to pick 18 representatives.  When they had done that, I asked them to pretend that L.A. was confederating in 1867. Who wouldn't be a part of Confederation anymore?  They knocked off their politicians one by one based on the criteria I gave them: no non-British subjects saw that the cast of The Jersey Shore was dismissed; no Native peoples got Jacob Black and the Quileute tribe dismissed; and without women, Lady Gaga and Megan Fox had to go, leaving them with only 6 representatives left of their original 18.  These six included George Clooney and Justin Bieber, but I later told them that Justin Bieber was too young to participate anyways and got rid of him.  Cheers of joy from the boys in the group and groans of lamentation from the girls ensued.

Part of the difficulty about picking activities for these teaching exercises has been finding a proper balance between education and entertainment; this week, I definitely strayed too far into the latter.  The activity went by so quickly that I didn't debrief my students as well as I would have liked.  We found ourselves talking about a lot of topics completely unrelated to Confederation.  Also, one of the girls in my group had little to no knowledge of popular culture, meaning that she was largely unable to participate.  For my final teaching activity, I'm going to have to think of something that borrows from popular culture but allows the students to focus on the topic of the teaching presentation.  This isn't to say that the students didn't learn anything; I found that they had picked up on a lot of different material, they understood the purpose of the exercise, and they had a lot of fun doing it.  However, it's clear that I'm still learning how to engage my students with the information, and I'm confident that my next activity will strike the proper chord between education and entertainment.

I do think that I was successful in other areas though.  I made a special point of talking to the shier members of the group, particularly the girl who couldn't engage with the pop culture icons, and I got her talking about her interests which also got her to become more involved with the overall discussion.  Also, my group showed a lot of knowledge about Confederation that they picked up from both my activity and the other monologues, proving that they were paying attention and that my activity had, perhaps, not been such a bust.

Overall, I would give this group a solid three: they were talkative and excited, even if it wasn't about the subject matter, showed a lot of knowledge about Confederation, and they participated in the activity and the presentation of the activity with a fair degree of success.