Pins and Needles

Ralph Kramden once said, "Pins and needles, needles and pins. A happy man is a man who grins."

There are times when you have to just grin and go on.

Today my lesson failed miserably. Not because it was a bad lesson but because the seventh and eighth graders may not have been ready for it. We are doing some media literacy and looking at pictures and ads and what one person sees in the picture from another person. I just had one of the worst discussion days today. The concepts of deduction, inference, and connotation were way too high for them. I went in with high hopes. I did my best. I could see in their eyes they weren't getting it.

That's just one lesson though. They will be analyzing their own choice of advertisement in a paper next week. Hopefully, that will be a much better idea than to speak in generalities. We did look at the picture above and try to see what others might interpret. We tried.

It's all right. This is what you learn as a teacher the first time you teach a certain grade level. There are some concepts that they just aren't cognitively ready for and you only learn that by trying.

They are doing phenomenally well with their Shakespeare speech memorization though.