My First Class

I recently taught my first class as the "lead teacher" (my mentor lurked in the shadows, interjecting occasionally with pointers for me and the students). I am teaching a Speech class, which is presenting difficulties that a traditional English class would not. Specifically, speech is largely about performance, and I am more comfortable with literature, things you can study on the page. To ease into things (for me anyways), I gave a lecture on Aristotle's "On Rhetoric" in which we discussed his theories of ethos, pathos and logos, as well as his personal view of the power of rhetoric. I trimmed the selection down significantly to the most essential elements to make the reading more accessible. (Another issue I am running into is that the majority of these kids are forgoing more difficult English courses because they are ESL or simply not very strong English students). Why, you may be asking, would I put these kids through such dense material on the second class in an elective? Well I was surprised by their level of engagement, they are well behaved and attentive for the most part, and I tried to get as much discussion going as possible. The second part of the class was far more enjoyable, we watched selections from Thank You for Smoking and discussed how Aristotilian theory relates to the rhetorical magic of Nick Naylor. I was happily surprised by how well they connected the two works, and I hope they learned something because I am giving them a quiz on Wednesday! Haha, it is strange thinking about how to make this quiz, and as we reviewed for it today in class I had a hard time not saying "write this down, it will be exactly what's on the quiz!"
We are outlining the course and the syllabus as we go, so it's sort of stressful, but at the same time my mentor is endowing me with plenty of excellent teaching tips, tools and advice.