Today was my first day in full control of my lower level Modern American Lit class. Actually, Ms. G needed them for the first half hour so I had them for however much time was left. Not going to lie...it was sort of a disaster.
I had given the TA a short story to copy yesterday to give to the students today. She did them, I put them away, great. Well, today I passed out the story for the kids to read and do an activity with and one of my students came up to me and said "There is a page missing." I thought maybe it was just his packet but no...every single packet was missing a page (which just happened to contain the main pieces of the story). Wow, big fail. I don't know what happened to that stupid missing page...I had it in my original copy of the story and I don't know if I didn't give the TA all the pages or if she lost one in the shuffle...either way I should have checked the packet over and I didn't. Lesson learned. Luckily there were booklets for a different class in the room that had my short story in it so I passed those out to the kids and they were able to read the story from there. Apparently, though, I'm not very good at judging time because I gave them about 20 minutes to read the story and I guess they didn't finish. Ms. G said these students will typically need about 40 minutes to read that sort of thing, even if it seems like a short piece to me. I also finished with the activity early, probably because I didn't give them enough time to read, so they had 10 minutes at the end of class doing nothing. Needless to say I felt sort of like a failure after that class, although I know I was just being too hard on myself.
So hopefully tomorrow will go more smoothly. I am teaching 2nd and 3rd blocks because Ms. E will not be there. Busy day!
Always check things twice!
Katie
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