Lesson 3

For my third lesson at the GED class, I taught 'conclusion' paragraphs.

Although I made a 3rd lesson plan, I have started to truly believe in improvising. I think I have definitely improved myself as a teacher in the past couple of lessons. The first lesson was something I was very comfortable with and have done before many times so it came naturally to me. However, the second lesson was a topic that took a lot of effort, because I was trying to find something to do with the class that is not just boring run-on sentence exercises and something interactive that will make students interested. Also, I tried to fit in too much into one lesson and of course I went over an hour. However, for this lesson, I did a lot of research to try to find something to do. I taught how to do conclusions, and again, I wasn't sure how I can teach that to the class in a simplified way.

The first hand out I gave to the students was after I put the introduction on the projector and tried to get out of the students, the points and suggestions needed for a conclusion to this introduction. Followed by the first one, I also gave out the second hand out that had the model introduction and conclusion paragraphs.

In the second portion of the class, I first just handed out the introductions of two paragraphs and the conclusions but cut up in strips that they had to put together (as mentioned in lesson plan). Once they finished putting it together on the big papers, I then handed out the answer key to them in Hand Out 3.

I only went about 10-15 minutes over but I overall I was very happy with the lesson and I know that the students were as well. It was very interactive, and it made the students get out of their seats to work together and they had to defend their cases as a group so a lot of team work was involved. Also, when explaining how to do the conclusion at all, I again used a lot of personal experiences as a tutor in the writing center to explain it.

The evaluation that I got from the students of lesson 2 showed that the ones that were there in class did remember and understand the topic; however, only one student mentioned that I did not clarify the topic in a way that I did not make it simple enough. I like and congratulate her honesty in this because I did feel that this is the case as well. The truth is, grammar is a very hard topic to touch upon and at times it is hard to think of a way to simplify it because in today's world, there's never a definite answer since language is changing so much.

I have learned so much from all of my lessons at the GED class and I will definitely be able to use these experiences for my teaching career. I must say though, I will be very sad to leave the internship next week around the same time...