Topics that are Difficult to Describe

During this week of student teaching, two things stood out to me the most. The first is something that I feel I would need to work on myself. This is my relatively poor planning and time management skills. I know that I could deliver better lessons if I allowed myself enough time to effectively work on and review my lessons before I present them. I believe that I am still working on getting into the teacher mindset that I am developing within myself.

The second thing that I have noticed is that I seem to struggle more with teaching about tasks that come easily to me. An example of this is that I am struggling with teaching my students how to properly read a ruler. I believe that this is in part due to being able to easily read the ruler and give the measurements that it shows. As this task isn't something I have struggled with I am struggling to teach my students how to do this. I am also having trouble helping some of my students to understand the concept of simplifying their measurements. Similar to the measurements this is not something I have struggled with so I am not sure what I am missing in my explanations. I am putting this into perspective when I was trying to do applied measurements in my own Agricultural Mechanics class. I knew how to do the measurements and how to do the conversions but for some reason, I couldn't grasp how to accurately give the measurements.

As teachers how have you tackled this issue? When you have a topic that comes naturally to you do you ever struggle with teaching the concepts to your students?

Comments

  1. UnknownFebruary 10, 2020 at 6:40 AM

    The curse of knowledge is a real thing, Abbie. Half the battle is recognizing it, which you have done here. As it relates to rulers, this exemplified my sermon I often had in class on the need for the metric system, but I digress... Most of my students' issues with ruler came down to basic math skills first and foremost. I had to brush them up on fractions with no judgement before they were able to apply it.

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  2. Kaitlin LiszkaFebruary 15, 2020 at 6:36 PM

    You could always ask a student in the class that has grasped the content to give the class an explanation of whatever you are struggling to explain. They might be able to explain it in a way that you wouldn't think of that could make something click with the other students in the class that are struggling.

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