Lesson "Plans"

I don't remember my first day of school. I know at some point in time I was that scared little girl, walking into kindergarten. I probably donned pigtails and carried a Lisa Frank backpack. The years following kindergarten, my introduction to this thing called school, I only really remember the excitement of back-to-school shopping. My grandma says, "There's nothing better than the smell of a fresh box of crayons," and I tend to agree with her. While I don't remember the concrete details of my first day of each new school year as a student, I don't think I will ever forget my first day on the other side of the desks as a teacher.

My Unit for ENG 103 is on a Community Issues Argument. Over the past several weeks, I developed what I thought was a comprehensive, cohesive, and even fun lesson plan. Within the first ten minutes of my first day of teaching, in true Comp Tales fashion, I discovered the master design was going to vary greatly from the user experience.


My students had just turned in their second papers at the beginning of this 9 a.m. class, which meant a significant portion of them had been up late the night before writing said papers. The discussion component of my introductory lesson plan went out the window. They did not care about my intricately woven and detailed unit plan for this next essay. As I began explaining the assignment and moving into my topic of defining "community," their hands became incessant red lights on my road to instruction.

After about 6 students interrupted the overall agenda with a question about format or research or topic selection, I parked the car, so to speak, and went off book. I realized that they were not going to absorb any of my information until they purged their own concerns. We took the next ten minutes or so to discuss this paper as a whole. Though every one of the questions raised had a very specific point in one of my upcoming lessons, the students needed to both clarify things up front and test my credibility as their teacher for this unit. As we moved into the group project I had created about argumentative language, the engine revved and we were back on the road.

I reflected on this day-one detour while I revisited my lesson plan for Wednesday. Revision of my plan for the next class revolved around this "road map" image, and I understood and appreciated the students' desire and need for a deeper overview of where we are going before we get in the car. I actually laughed to myself as I remembered an evaluation from undergrad in which I critiqued the professor for mot offering more explicit objectives in the beginning. Ha! A few years later and I may as well have been critiquing myself. The first day of teaching and subsequent reflection definitely revealed a disconnect between theory and application, something I've always known but not experienced.

Though I don't completely recall being that little Lisa Frank enthusiast, I believe a bit of her shone through on Monday, September 29, 2014, as a slightly nervous first-year Masters student taught ENG 103 for the first time. The pigtails were gone, but the exciting promise of the trials and tribulations to come coursed stronger than ever through my veins.