A Starting Point

This is what I've learned from my first day of observations. A quick point, before I begin, is that I am a big fan of telling stories. While watching my cooperating teacher today, I saw a lot of the same techniques in teaching the lesson that I did in any of the stories I've ever told.

One of the biggest similarities is that in both teaching and telling a story, you need to adapt to the different audiences. Something that might work for one group in a lesson won't necessarily work for another group. (much like changing the punchline of a story for different people). I saw this today as my teacher mentioned the concept of political correctness in his first class, but did not mention the term in later classes because the students were not familiar with it.

In a more general sense, history is like a story just because you need to care about what you're telling about. If you try to tell a story, but either show no emotion or forget the important parts (think Marlin from Finding Nemo), then your audience will not be interested. The same goes for teaching history (think Ben Stein from Ferris Bueller's Day Off). A lot of what will make or break the lesson will be the delivery.

At least that's what I've learned from my first day.