I Guess it's Time to Talk About my Own Lesson...

I always hate talking about my own work, so I definitely write this post begrudgingly. A few weeks ago, Megan and I did our lesson on nightmares, and I am happy to say that it actually went pretty well. It took a lot of work, a lot of planning, and then a lot of reworking, but in the end it was definitely all worth it.

Some things I learned were:

1) The importance of persistence! When you have a good idea you shouldn't give up on it even if you face some struggles while executing it. We knew that our puppet lesson could be really fun because of how different it was than any of the lessons we had seen up to that point, but there were a lot of technical issues along the way. How do we take a concept that's probably considered elementary by most people, and make it appropriate for high school kids? What materials do we use? How can we do this all this in such a short time? But after a lot of planning, practicing, and talking to Aaron and other classmates, we were able to figure out answers to most of our problems.

2) Be open to change! In life, nothing really goes the way they are planned. Although planning is always important, especially when it comes to any kind of formal presentation, you always have to be open to the unavoidable fact that things will change, and that is okay! For instance, in our lesson, our "artist lecture/discussion" went so much faster than we had planned for. At first, this made me really nervous because I thought we would be stuck with all of this time at the end of the lesson. In reality, the extra time was given to the students to continue working on their puppets, and they totally needed it. In fact, several people told us they could have used even more time. This also worked out in the end because our lecture was quick enough to be informative but not boring and lecture-like. We were able to get our information out to students, but also gave them a decent amount of time to work.

3) Happiness is contagious! When you're having fun, it's hard for those around you not to have fun also. Megan and I decided that if we went into the puppet show not afraid to make fools of ourselves, everyone's guards would be down in and they wouldn't worry about having fun and being themselves, too. We tried to have a laid back approach and make everyone comfortable with what we were doing, which seemed to really help the atmosphere and allow for students to really connect to the project.