Experience #3 Writing/Composition - Shakespear

OH MAN...Shakespeare with professor Smith... what a dude.. This class for me was an 8am class in winter quarter so let's just say that, that alone made it very very VERY rough for me to be motivated in. Regardless of the class itself, this class specifically taught me two very important things as a future teacher; it taught me that lectures do not have to be boring, and that writing and composition do not need to just be graded on the formality of the paper but rather the ideas and purpose that the paper is being written for. I learned that lectures didn't have to be boring because that was the entirety of this class, we would go in at 8am and come out at 930 am from just a hour and half of pure lecture, but it wasn't boring. The way that Professor smith taught was very knowledgeable and fun but did nothing other than lecturing which is not and was not my personal preference for teaching or learning but that way he did it was fun. We always had stories to listen to and fun facts that got thrown into each boring lecture about the history of shakespeare and the plays he wrote which made me realize that I didn't have to hate lectures as much as I thought I did. Although I don't think I could ever personally teach in a lecture environment I did get to see a good representation of what that would look like if I did and as a future educator that in important. I also learned that sometimes in writing it isn't always about the format and punctuation but more what you are trying to say/ the points that you are trying to get across by writing the paper you are writing. I learned this in this class because all of our papers had to be written and turned in within a 90 minute period of time. Our professor didn't care what format we used, the pucunation that was used, or even if we used good grammar, he just wanted to know what we learned and what we knew which is why our papers were cut so short. By being tested in this way I realized that sometimes the best work that I do is under pressure, and also that we as teachers don't always need to put so much pressure on our students to produce perfect looking papers. I personally wrote very thick papers with a lot of information but not a lot of format to them and that showed myself and my professor that I understood what I was talking about. By lifting the pressure of producing a perfect paper I was better able to show the things that I found important and the things that I understood which is a valuable lesson that I think I will use in my classroom in the future.