High School Teaching Experience

 

I had a great opportunity to do some teaching at Freeman High School. This artifact is a handout I gave the students while teaching the section on solubility rules and precipitation reactions. While the teacher had final say on both the material and method of delivery, she did give me a lot of leeway and personal preference on my actual teaching experience.

 

The interesting part of this handout comes from knowing that it was a “cheat sheet” for the students. Some teachers consider this information something that needs to be memorized immediately and will test students’ ability to quickly and efficiently commit this data to memory. I feel that at a general chemistry level—where I was teaching—the best way to have students learn this material is to get hands on practice using it. Armed with that theory, I laminated a chart for each student and spent class time working through problems all together and then in small groups. I observed, even after only one class, many students were already memorizing the information just through using it for a half hour. By explaining to them that they did not need to memorize it, I noticed their visual reactions were to slightly relax. I imagine they would have stiffened and be intimidated had they thought they needed to memorize it. I asked a group of students as they were working what they thought of having the cheat sheet and they replied that they felt it allowed them to think more of the chemistry as opposed to just some random rules. Success! I think this illustrates my commitment to teaching students how to think, how to process information in a logical manner in order to solve problems, not to spend their time memorizing facts and rules. I think this is a better use of their time as it can be extended not only to other subjects inside a classroom setting but also to countless situations outside of the classroom.