Teaching Class on Iran and Nuclear Weapons

I think the best advice that I could give someone who has yet to enter the classroom through this program is not to underestimate the amount of information that these students are actually capable of absorbing. I was very concerned that they were not going to be able to make effective arguments during our exercise as arguing points on how the US should handle the Iraninan situation is something you would typically think you would need a lot of background information in order to do. However, just using the 40 minutes worth of information that Rebecca and I gave to them, they were able to make some pretty impressive and cogent arguments. At the end of the class their homeroom teacher asked them all to recount at least one thing they learned in class and they all came up with something pretty good. I will be asking that question at the end of all my classes in the future.

In general, I have found that there will always be students who just don't care or are more interested in doing their hair throughout class. You can try and reach these kids, but if you can't then focus on the ones who are interacting with you. The teacher is our classroom was pretty good at controlling her kids and there were only 7 or 8 of them so we had a pretty well organized class however there was at least one "class clown." I found it best every time he asked a question or made a statement that was meant as a joke I would simply act oblivious to his attempt at humor and answer everything straight up. Overall it was a very rewarding experience and a lot of fun.

Auspicious Beginnings

Hey everyone! I’d like to kick off our YPFP in the Classroom blog with a brief recap of our first classroom session this school year. On November 14, Katie Skartvedt and I taught a session on AIDS in Africa at the Thurgood Marshall Academy. Katie has some familiarity with African issues; I had absolutely none. In preparing our lesson plan, I spent a few hours just getting generally acclimated to the topic before starting to put together the lesson with Katie.

I wasn’t very nervous going into the session itself. I thought I had done a good job preparing myself for the lesson by researching the topic thoroughly and trying to anticipate some of the questions the students might have. I had also previously visited the school, so I was comfortable with the surroundings and I knew what kind of students I would be working with. (I highly encourage everyone to do this before going into a classroom!)

We spent the first 10 minutes or so of the lesson chatting with the students, learning about what they had been working on in the class over the past few weeks and telling them about ourselves. That time proved useful in establishing a connection with the students before we started teaching them. The rest of the session unfolded better than we could have expected. It became clear early on that there were a couple of students who were natural leaders, and their engagement helped draw the rest of the class in for the duration of the lesson.

Overall the experience was rewarding on a number of levels. I obtained a wealth of knowledge on an important subject I had known nothing about. I gained some insight on best practices for getting students to connect to material – having two back to back long lecture modules, for instance, was clearly suboptimal in hindsight. But most importantly, I could tell we had reached the students. During the analysis exercise at the end of the session, the students demonstrated that they had begun to grasp some of the central tensions in the effort to stem the tide of AIDS in Africa.

If anyone has any questions, feel free to comment and I will get back to you. I’m looking forward to reading some blog posts from you all on our upcoming sessions!

Welcome to the YPFP in the Classroom Blog!

This site allows YPFP-C volunteers to share experiences, advice and lesson plans.