the Class overall

I really enjoyed this class this semester! I think that we had a lot of really beneficial conversations, and i feel a lot more comfortable about teaching literature in a classroom now. I think that i now have a good background about the various ways you can approach a book, and all the things i can do with a book, like guest speakers, field trips, etc. There is so much i didn't know about that is possible, while i was going through middle and high school. I hope that teachers are actually using these techniques in their classrooms, besides the ones we read about. I think some of the strong points of this class were the blogging. It made me want to pay more attention and not be so stressed about having to write a formal paper about the information we were learning about. That just adds a lot of added pressure that wasn't really needed because i feel like blogging gives just as much insight if we did the work or not. I also liked how our class focused on whole class discussion more than just lecturing. This also made me do the readings so i knew what to talk about, and when i did talk i didn't sound stupid or uninformed.
Something i would recommend fixing for the next semester would be to make more requirements for the chapter teaches. I felt that they were very redundant and when we had more in one day, it was pretty boring and i sometimes found myself not paying as close of attention. I would try to add some more creative ways to teach or discuss the chapters so each person isn't doing the same thing every time.
Other than that, i really enjoyed this class, and wish i could have you for 379!!

The Giver

I think that our teaching presentation went really well. I think that we were well prepared, and for only having six kids in the class, the discussions were fairly good. I really enjoyed our beginning activity, and i am glad that we were able to do a lot of things the other groups didn't do, especially since we were last to present. However, i think there are some things we could have done better. I think that it would have gone more smoothly if we had practiced the presentation a bit more. We felt that we should all be an equal part, and we didn't want one person to have to take control of any single activity, so we tried to all do a little part of each, even if it was just to ask questions. Speaking of questions, i think that we asked a lot of probing questions to the class, and made them think about the book. I also think that we could have had a lot more to talk about. I believe that we wanted more discussion about the banned book issue, which i was a little disappointed that we didn't get more discussion out of it. Overall i think we did a good job, and our group work really well together. I also like that we only had three group members, which made things easier, just a lot more work.