Allie Timpert

Professor Suk
Education Field Experience- EDUC 230-01
Fall 2014
Blog Post #6
Have you ever told the same story more than once but to a different person or group? Did
you tell the story the same exact way, with the same exact words? As a teacher, your days will be
filled with different classrooms and with different students but sometimes, with the same lessons
to be taught. Will you retell the lesson the same exact way as your first class, with the same exact
tone and words? The answers to these questions changed for me after having the opportunity to
view this scenario. After observing two periods at DVHS with a teacher that essentially taught
the same lesson back to back, I learned that teaching is not a speech to prepare, it is not
something you can memorize like a vocabulary test and it is definitely not mundane. Your lesson
may stay the same in the sense of reaching the same goals with all your students, but getting
there is a different journey in every class. This opportunity gave me the chance to understand
how to prepare for a lesson with different classrooms and the necessary use of differentiated
instruction.
The teacher at DVHS taught a lesson on Homers The Iliad with two different periods
of students. Although the materials stayed the same, the content knowledge and the goals
remained, the two periods were completely different from one another because of the students
and all of their differences they bring to the classroom. In the mini lesson, the teacher had the
female students write one thing that they would give to the King (one male student) to bribe
him into choosing her. Essentially, all the girls wrote something different from one another.

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However, in the second period class, the girls all decided to come together and write the same
thing so that they could see who the King would pick. After the activity, the teacher split the
students up into their pods to answer a few questions about the main characters in the book. I
noticed that in the first class, the students mostly all stayed on task and completed the
assignment. However, in the second period, the teacher had a more challenging time keeping his
students on task. I found that although as a teacher you will have to teach core content
knowledge to all of your students, there may just be different ways of getting their with your
students. This was a learning opportunity for me to realize that teaching is not a rehearsal. Your
days will not be the same as the day before. With this, I feel that I have learned one of the most
valuable lessons in teaching which is to teach with your students in mind. In other words, your
students create the climate in the classroom and your job as the educator is to go off of your
students abilities and teach according to their needs.
After my observations with the two periods at DVHS, I began to get excited about my
future as an educator and for the new and unknown. This opportunity not only gave me the
chance to see how teachers are able to carry out the same lesson with different classrooms, but
also the importance in not memorizing. Teaching is nothing like a rehearsed speech. Education is
changing and the antiquated ways of teaching like Charlie Browns teacher has ended. Every
single one of your students is and will be different and with that, so will your classrooms.