I will be the first to admit -- when I started teaching, I taught the way I had been taught - memorization, discipline, and intrinsic motivation were all MAJOR parts of my approach. Guess what? It's not that simple!
In this day and age, students are not little drones who can sit at a desk for five to six hours a day and stay focused on whatever task we put in front of them. They need to be involved, engaged, and in a way, entertained throughout the day or mischief finds a home.
Students today enjoy working in collaborative groups, and when monitored properly, they usually benefit from this approach. And then, there are days like yesterday.
Yesterday, I was demonstrating to my Science classes how, as water warms, it rises (the same thing happens with air, but that was for the next discussion). With our wonderful hands-on kits, the students are to work in groups to perform many of the experiments and investigations. This particular investigation required students to work together with cold, colored water, room temperature water, and hot water (about 60 degrees Celsius). Working on this project with 25 fifth-graders who all want to participate, and participate without haste, can be a challenging thing.
As much as I feel the students get out of working in cooperative groups, this particular activity was just not working as well as the publishers or I had planned. The students were eager to get started and poured the different liquids a little too quickly to see the proper results.
This was a case of their growing interest in Science being of detriment, as this particular investigation required a steady hand and a patient mind. On 12/8, my students didn't seem to have either.
Enter today's presentation.
One of the classes didn't meet yesterday, due to an assembly. I took advantage of yesterday's two classroom experiences to demonstrate this particular investigation to the entire class, rather than students working in pairs. I still utilized student help (they LOVE to help with experiments and investigations), so some were able to benefit from that experience. All were able to benefit from the results that patience and a steady hand provided.
The morals of today's post? What worked in the past might not work in the present. What worked with one group of students might not work with another. What worked with one group of students on one particular day might not work with the same group of students on another day.
Fifth-graders are people, just like the rest of us. They have good days and they have bad days. They have days where they are totally into the presentation, and days where they wish they were somewhere, anywhere but the classroom. There are days that you have to adapt your instruction on the fly to help reach the most students you can on that particular day.
And that's what makes this job so challenging. And that's what makes this job worth every minute of it all.
