I'm Still Not Very Good with PowerPoint

Last year I pretty much only taught one type of class. Yes, I had the Coventry classes but they were really just another version of oral English. This term most of my classes were very different. I was asked to teach "The Society and Culture of Major English Speaking Countries." I believe the school has offered this class for some time, Amy taught it last year, but before Amy I think that most people who taught it made it pretty similar to an oral English class. I wanted to do something pretty different with this class also so I decided to focus on just one or two countries, the book goes over way to many to cover in just one semester. Most of my classes were pretty short since we missed a couple of weeks for the pig flu, more on that in another post, but I still got in some interesting things. Teaching this class was a lot more work than the classes I taught last year since I had to lecture for most of the class rather than have the students speak. At first my plan was to lecture for about half the class and then do activities relating to the lecture for the other half but I just wasn't covering enough so I moved to a more interactive method where I would lecture but stop a lot to ask the students questions.

For example if I was lecturing about early America I would ask the students to try to think up some reasons people might have left Europe for America. I started with America, in fact some classes were so short that I really only covered America, and then moved on to the UK. For America especially the history was no problem for me I've taken American history courses so many times over the years that I know it with my eyes closed. The problem was that I wanted to make the history interesting. I find things like the American Revolution and American government very interesting but it was hard to find ways to convey that interest to the students so I wouldn't just be up there spouting off names and dates at them. I think my class was in some ways uneven. It took me a while to find a type of lecturing I wanted and it took a lot of work to come up with an outline and a PowerPoint for every class. For some things I think there is a lot of room in improvement in what I did to make it more interesting and more engaging. Some lectures I did I liked a lot though. The one I mentioned previously on American foreign policy was fun since it included talking about how the students felt about America. Another good lecture was on British history when I did sort of a soap opera version of Henry VIII.

The Henry VIII idea, for those who don't know he was the king of England who split for the Catholic Church and had six wives, was actually a lecture my old debate coach Mrs. Anderson used to do every year in her class. I never actually took the class but the idea of doing it as a soap opera worked very well. I think if I had to do the American Revolution again I would focus more on individual stories and what not to make it feel more real. I also did several quizzes and a final which was pretty different than last year. In a place where even the school sometimes encourages cheating I had them sit far apart and I walked around making absolutely sure no one was cheating. I hope the students didn't get too much of the wrong impression from this but at least I was confident that I was getting honest work. Teaching the class was actually a lot of fun just because it was something different from what I did last year. I'd actually like to teach it again next semester if I get the chance just to put some of the ideas I had in the middle of the semester into action.

I used PowerPoint during most of the lectures even though I think I'm the only person left in the world who's not very good with it. I unlike pretty much everyone else never had to use it much, or really at all, during college since I was an English major and most of my work consisted of writing papers. What I decided to do with PowerPoint was not to put the whole lecture notes up on it since I think it just encourages people to write them down and then not pay attention. Instead I put up only pictures or in one or two cases diagram to illustrate my point. If I was talking about congress there might be a picture of the capitol building, or if I was talking about George Washington maybe a picture of him crossing the Delaware.