Liam Cohen – 4/29/09 – Teach-in reflection
In total I am relieved that the whole project is over. Don’t get me wrong I enjoyed the whole process but it was stressful to put the whole thing together and I haven’t gotten much sleep this whole week because it has been fretful and jam packed. Beside the point I felt like the Teach-in was an unexpected success for me. I felt like I was underprepared and that the activity that I had planed wasn’t fulfilled enough. If I were to give a suggestion for next year the deadline for the completed workshop should be a few days before because a demo workshop must be given to the eighth graders not teachers. I feel like giving the workshop for actual kids will give you a better, more realistic run through. I am saying this because if my entire workshop was ready a few days before, which was difficult I have been preparing it for a few weeks, but if it was I would have been able to make my activity more exciting and fun filled instead of being more a lecture like workshop. To move back into how the whole day went I would say, as I said before, went unexpectedly well, this was mostly because of the workshop because I was fairly confident of the movie that my set up group made for the opening presentation. I felt the movie played out well and all of the tech stuff through out the day ended on a good note, a few bumps, but as I said ended on a good note. Continuing on to the workshop part of the day. For me both of my groups were good for different reasons. I really enjoyed teaching a lot of the 5th and 6th graders because they seemed really interested during my first workshop. Each workshop was different each time I gave it. One time seemed more interactive as I gave the presentation and didn’t spend as much time on the role-playing part as I wanted to. The second time around I spent less time on being interactive and the presentation so I could get to the role-playing part at the end quicker and spend more time on it. Each time was different, the first time around everyone seemed really interested except for the two seventh graders. Then the second time around it looked like everyone was interested. Also, the teachers in the room (Sherezada for both workshops and Sharon for the second) was really helpful for giving me information about how much time I had left and making sure I kept my workshop to speed and kept the kids under control. They were a big help, thank you to them. To conclude I would just like to say the whole thing went extremely well and I thank all the people who helped set it up and hoped that everyone enjoyed it as much as I did.