Beginning to teach

I did it! I taught my first lesson in a junior high school. I admit I was quite nervous planning it, but ironically I kept hearing the song “Courageous” on the radio leading up to the experience, and the lyrics were becoming a mantra of sorts for me. Pastor John Hall and Matthew West wrote, “We were made to be courageous. We were made to lead the way. We could be the generation that finally breaks the chains.” Music has always been the modem that inspires me, and it was working.

My assignment was to choose an appropriate book to read as an interactive read-aloud to the eighth grade English class that I am currently working in as an intern. After talking with the teacher, I learned that they were going to be entering a unit on ethics, and he suggested I pick a short story that would be about a contemporary issue involving an ethical choice teens sometimes have to make. It wasn’t easy to find a short story like that, I found out. I checked the libraries and the Internet, but it began to look as if I would not be able to find an appropriate short story in time. I finally found it, though, and the way I found it seemed as providential to me as the song “Courageous” was.

I was driving home and saw a sign advertising a garage sale that was giving all of its profits toward pancreatic cancer research. Having lost my mother to pancreatic cancer, I couldn’t resist stopping. Sure enough, while there I found a large collection of books, one of which was Taste Berries for Teens. Somehow, I knew that this was the book I was looking for and bought it. Inside I found the story “Party On!” by 15-year-old Susan Hinkle, and it was just what I had been looking for.

Meanwhile, I knew that this was the last week my local movie theater was showing the movie the song “Courageous” was based on, so I decided to further prepare myself and went to see the movie. Sure enough, I found it even more inspiring than the song alone and knew I was ready. I wrote my lesson plan, organized some questions, and waited.

The class seemed to listen and respond well to both the story and my discussion questions, but I still had some doubts until I saw their papers. I had decided to give them a post-writing exercise as an informal assessment, asking them to respond to the question if they would be able to be like Susan, the main character in the story, and stand up to their friends if their friends were trying to get them to do something that they knew was wrong. To more accurately gauge them as a class, I asked them to not put their names on their papers, telling them it would not be graded. I just wanted to know what their responses were. I am a firm believer that it helps a person’s resolve to follow through with an action if they take the time to determine what that action will be ahead of time, like the “stop, drop, and roll” fire-safety technique. I hoped this would lead to similar positive results.

I knew I had accomplished my purpose when I read their papers. They showed that not only did they seem to grasp what it means to be an ethical person, but their comments made me feel like I had made a difference in their lives as well. The majority read something like these two: “Yes, because friends are people that stand up for you and that means you have to stand up for them and help them if they make the wrong choices,” and “I would be able to. My friends would listen to my ideas, and they wouldn’t be my friends if they didn’t.” Yes, there were a couple who said they would still go to the party, even when knowing their parents would not approve, but by far the majority felt they would make the ethical choice to do the right thing. Regardless of their choice, I knew the class had listened to my lesson about ethics, and I believe that is all a teacher can do, to be courageous, to lead the way.