I have to admit to more than a mild degree of nervousness going into my micro-teaching lesson this evening. I am not a teacher by profession, and was worried that I wouldn’t know how to present the material, or that people wouldn’t engage the way I expected…
But this went really well. I feel like we got pretty deep into what Shakespeare was addressing in Sonnet 110, and I’m happy that the writing exercise was as useful as it was for everybody, and served my intended purpose of getting students to really think about the text on a more personal, interactive level.
We had a great discussion, and covered a lot of different ideas in a short amount of time. Ideally, I’d have loved to spend more time on all of them, but with only 15 minutes, I think (and hope you all agree) that we all improved our understanding of this poem in particular, and maybe made analyzing Shakespeare a little less daunting for those of you who worried about it.
The feedback that you gave me after the lesson was very useful; knowing that I was balancing my own comments with allowing the class to discuss and make discoveries for itself was good to hear. I’m never quite sure at what point my intervention is needed in these cases, so hearing that my gut instinct for it is more or less accurate was very reassuring for me as a novice teacher.