always experimenting

So, the school year is almost halfway over, and I'm still trying new things. When we started school in August, I thought that I had the year all planned, but then in September I discovered that some of my sophomores are struggling with nonfiction, and my seniors needed new contemporary British literature more than the classics that we currently have.  Luckily, our administration allowed us to buy new mysteries for our seniors, and Donors Choose also helped me to buy a set of British novels for my seniors, but I'm still struggling with my sophomores.

I decided in October that I would focus on nonfiction with my sophomores, and some great friends and colleagues shared wonderful ideas with me.  Then, we met together as a department, looked at test scores, and realized that our learning targets weren't the same targets that our students are being tested on, so my nonfiction plans went out the window.  I'm now focusing on main idea and getting students to identify main idea, which really goes along with nonfiction any way because this is something they were struggling with as we read literary and informational texts. Today, I pulled out a lesson plan from a few years ago, and we reviewed the difference between main idea and theme.  It was great! Most of the students got it as we were watching short movie clips, and they were able to write a decent journal entry about the main idea of the book they are currently reading. The majority of them were even able to identify the main idea of O Pioneers for me since that is the book we are studying in class, but through this lesson, I learned that my students now have a hard time identifying the narrator of a written text and the point of view.

Therefore, after today, I will be revising once again, and we will be doing mini-lessons about narrator, voice, and point of view.  Each year I think it will be the year that I don't have to make any changes or try anything new, but each year, I am reminded that teaching does not work that way.  My students are all very different, and every year, they seem to need a different focus.  So, I am continually revising, throwing away the old, and creating new to try to meet their individual needs.  In all honesty, I hope I never get to the point where I don't change or try new things. I hope that even after teaching for 30 or more years, I will always be experimenting.