What is a Lesson?

Posted by Dorit Sasson Dec 27, 2006

That first year for me was scary, a very difficult transition from the cushiony fourth year to the first year alone in the classroom. I wanted the ever constant guidance of my mentor and counselors but I was expected to deal with problems alone. As an in-service student who thought my love for pantomime, drama, music would aid me, I was incredibly self-conscientious. After all, I was still a new immigrant, barely three years in the country. Students were learning EFL through their Israeli eyes and I had been observing them through my American ones. I felt it was best to hold unto the framework of a lesson plan. After all, the structure made sense, it was something that I could hold unto. It was rudimentary work. Did it follow the formula I was taught of a pre-while and post? Were there transitions? After all, I was only repeating what I was taught to do…..And in all of this, I wanted to sound less foreign, more Israeli then perhaps the subject matter and the language would be more motivating…

Admittedly, this notion of what is a lesson as I was taught was my crutch. I leaned on it heavily. It came at the expense of developing my own teaching personality. But I had other things to worry about like blending in a cultural classroom that was increasingly becoming threatening to my authority as a new teacher.

Dear teachers, it would take me ten long years to realize something that I am telling you in a few paragraphs.

For someone who never had any experience coming to terms with my authority such as participating in any leadership skills or taking part in any student’s committees in High School, it was hard for me to accept my own authority as a teacher, even now.

That journey started with a 24 year old practice teacher who just wanted to have fun with her students and was crying in front of her fourth year counselor who, through my own shower of tears, told me that I was a teacher.

Write down your assets and what you believe you are good at. Look at those things that help you connect with the students on a growing basis and behave like the American express card commercial - “Never leave home with it!” A lesson is very dynamic and much of it is personality centered. The minute I learned to enter the classroom without my lesson book in my hand was the day the students were the foreground and not the lesson. The lesson is the means but not the means to the end. Seasoned teachers would call this ‘spontaneity.’ On a more profound level, I call it coming to terms with who you are as a person.

Back in the eighties, there was a colorful Mr. T who, upon every Social Studies lesson, walked into our classroom with a great big smile on his face. He called us “peoples” and “peeplets.” (perhaps the female version of “peoples”?) Truthfully, I don’t remember much from his lessons except the huge diaramas I prepared. It was later when I came to accept my authority as a teacher that his chalk throwing on us students was his own reason for getting us to listen. I don’t mean to say that you should go ahead and throw chalk of course, but do try to develop your own personalities as you come to grow and understand this concept of planning a lesson .

We all have to take those giant steps and small to larger risks with the activities we decide to do, and so, here we are and where we have come to be.

So, as a new teacher, you have the authority and you are in charge but in more ways than one.