Learn While You Teach

My classmates and I just finished our first lesson of the semester - our digital me! After we created our lesson that told about us, we had to teach it in front of our classmates as if we were teachers teaching a class.

Once again, since I had Dr. Smirnova last semester, I am very familiar with these activities so that definitely made me feel more comfortable teaching in front of my classmates. After doing so, I realized a lot of things about myself while teaching!

During the first week of classes, we created a powerpoint presentation. Each of us chose a slide and added words, pictures and links about ourselves. This made is easy to determine the order we were going to be teaching in, so I knew exactly when it would be my turn! As my turn was nearing, we were running out of class time. The last 10 minutes was mine to teach.

With this comes my first realization: I am not good under pressure when there is not a lot of time left.

In my short lesson, I had a lot planned:
1. Introduce myself
2. Have the class take the quiz
3. Go over each question
4. Hand out candy to the person who raised their hand and said the correct answer


I still got to accomplish what I had planned, but there wasn't a lot of time spend on each item, so I got nervous and rushed so I was able to get through them. That is when I realized that under pressure, I forget everything I planned on saying and say a bunch of random stuff that (probably) doesn't have a lot to do with the exact topic I'm talking about.

That brings me to my second realization: When you are prepared and know your information, you can be more yourself when you teach.

In this case, I was teaching about myself, which is the one thing I know best! Therefore, while teaching there wasn't much I could mess up on. This made me feel so much more comfortable while teaching which meant I was able to joke around more and be myself. On the other hand, if I didn't know what I was teaching and wasn't prepared, I would have been more nervous and it would have shown instead of my real personality.

Third realization: When you are teaching in front of a familiar audience, you feel more comfortable.

This one might be a given because it is normal to feel more comfortable around people you know. Last semester I was familiar with my classmates, but I didn't talk to them as much as I do this semester. Simply because of this I felt a lot more comfortable teaching my digital me this semester rather than last semester!

Although this might be the case, that doesn't mean that you will always be around people you feel comfortable teaching in front of. This brings us back to my second realization, you should always know your material that you are teaching.

Just by teaching this small lesson in front of my classmates, I was able to learn a little bit more about myself. The main thing I can take away from this is that you should always know your information and be prepared to teach it so your personality and passion will always shine.