Today, I teach.

I am teaching a high school lesson today!

I am not even that nervous, although I am sure it will ramp up over the next couple of hours.

The lesson I am teaching is a kinesthetic lesson wherein the students will play the roles of mRNA and tRNA as they carry out protein synthesis inside of our cell (classroom).  I get to live in the nucleus, where I will share the DNA "code" with the mRNAs!  Messenger RNA can travel between the nucleus and the cytoplasm, which is why it is necessary to carry out protein synthesis.  The instructions, encoded in the DNA sequence, need to be brought to the "work bench" where cellular machinery puts together polypeptide chains.  I do not think it is important to distinguish between polypeptide and protein at the freshman level (maybe in honors?).  What do you think?

I have realized that I love fun, move-around activities, such as role plays.  I don't want to just tell the students what a process is, I want them to carry out the process.  I am afraid it will not go as I envision.  It will be essential to show excitement and enthusiasm in order to get the kids to "get into character".  This lesson was kind of thrown together in short order so hopefully in the future I would have some time with which I could tweak the specifics and create some costumes or set pieces to help the atmosphere of our classroom "cell".  I am pretty excited to teach this lesson.

I can't believe that I am going to teach a lesson that I wrote to real students.  Teaching is so fun, I can't wait to be good at it!

In this paragraph I will address some concerns I have about the lesson.  First, I am afraid that I will lose focus and get off task.  If I cannot stay strictly on task, then how am I to expect the same of the students.  I think perhaps it would be good to make note cards with a brief outline, which I can reference and use to stay on task and on schedule.  Secondly, I am afraid that I won't ask good questions.  Now, you may be saying, there is no such thing as a bad question!  Wrong.  There is no such thing as a bad question from a student who is genuinely trying to figure something out, but there are absolutely bad questions from a teacher trying to accomplish something.  Asking questions, writing questions, getting the answers to question is hard!  My next biggest concern is that I won't get the kids to actively, truly participate.  I don't want them to just go around the room doing the bare minimum of work.  I want them to pretend that they are in a cell.  I want them to believe that they are RNA!  I hope what they take away from this lesson is that these are real processes that actually happen all the time inside their own bodies.  And that DNA is the instructions for proteins, which do all the work of living organisms, determining traits, structures and functions.  And that there is a certain precise process that takes place in order to get the DNA "instructions" out of the nucleus and to the place where proteins are made.  Life is insane to think about...

How in the heck do we exist?  It is beyond comprehension.  My ultimate goal is for them to realize how complex and miraculous life is.  How insanely wild the minute details of how we are put together and how we exist are.

I can't wait to teach!