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While I was madly planning for my first unit, I started to think about how I could make it more fresh and more inquiry-based. During my practicum experiences, I watched as material was taught in a very specific order: concept first, examples after. It got me thinking about what that looks like, and all I could think was, “how is that not boring, it’s all words!” The concepts for this unit are things like biodiversity, variation, niches, species, symbiosis, and natural selection, concepts which when left alone just end up as words on a page. Who actually remembers the three kinds of symbiosis? (The answers after the break.)
If I had to describe my first day as a first-year teacher at my first school in one word, it would be: nauseating. I was so sick with worry and nerves this morning that I almost threw up. And this isn’t even at a school I’ve never been to before, it was my first-year practicum school. So it’s not like I was walking into a school I didn’t know, I actually knew quite a bit about this school before I even arrived. But that didn’t change the fact that I was nervous as hell.
