Treadmills In The Classroom Eh??!!

CBC News in Canada recently covered an extremely intriguing story on a group of troubled students who were on basically their last limb of the educational tree. Allison Cameron is an eighth grade teacher in a high needs school in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. She was having trouble motivating her troubled students to do their work or even to come to school. Cameron decided something had to be done to help her students want to learn and be more involved. Ms. Cameron turned to a book written by John Ratey called Spark. This book contains information and studies on how movement and physical activity stimulates the brain and causes a students performance in the classroom to increase considerably. I feel this incredible article should be made more public to the rest of the world. This segment could easily help us Americans solve this obesity epidemic we have going on right now. Physical activity daily will not only make us healthier but exercising before learning would help us retain what we are learning and be more engaged in what is going on in the lesson. The kids in the story all showed vast improvements in behavior and academic standings and truly showed a want and desire to become better students.

Lab A2

The second time around felt much better while I was teaching, however after watching my lesson I found it was even worse. Though my teaching was better I had kids standing around doing NOTHING!! The activity time was basically not present at all and all in all it was another disaster. I need to work on my class managment skills and learn to maximize class participation. The evidence of my massacre can be found here.

1st Teaching Video

First and foremost I have ALOT of work to do. I'm usually pretty good infront of people but the whole idea of being surprised like that really threw me off. I didn't do any pinpointing and certainly didn't check for understanding. Over all this first attempt at teaching was a disaster, it was actually humiliating how horrible of a job I did. I need to bounce back from this and really do a better job next time.