Civilize this!

Last week, I finished teaching my first unit, conceived, planned, designed, and taught all by moi.

Ta-da!

Am I a teacher now? Not quite.

It was a unit on the origins of civilizations (not necessarily a small topic, but one we covered in a short period of time, although now I feel I could design a whole semester on this). It featured six lessons, showing the progression of human society through various typological phases:

1) Introduction; Hunter-gatherer lifestyle
2) Agriculture
3) Cities
4) Civilizations
5) Culture
6) How it all fits together (not a misnomer)

I'm really thrilled on the results. Planning the unit was cool, because I got to revisit all of my (not so) old anthropology notes and texts and articles and take a lot of information from them. I got to use a lot of typologies and characteristics and information I learned from good ole' Brantingham and Lesure and Smith et al. It also make me a true expert in the classroom. I totally convinced them I knew exactly what I was talking about (because I actually did) and there were moments when you could have heard a pin drop because they were hanging on every word I said. No joke. Like when they asked about early art, and I told them the earliest human art was found in Australia. Silence. "Really?" "How come?" "What was it?"

The teaching of the unit was spread over the course of three weeks, and I could see a definite improvement in my teaching as the lessons progressed. I was constantly revamping and reworking the structure and delivery of the lessons, writing new handouts and worksheets, creating vocab lists and homework, etc etc etc. It was a lot of fun, albeit a tad stressful. But I hope the students learned something.

Their final assessment is to take a stance on this question: was the development of civilizations good or bad? And then design a brochure/pamphlet arguing their case using a specific civilization (Egypt, India, or an imaginary one) for the details.

Part of the problem is my lead teacher and I got some of our signals with the timeline of the project muddled, so she assigned a big project for the ancient India unit due in a week and a half, so even though this brochure is supposed to be a smaller assignment, the kids were going, "This is too much!" "It's not fair" "You want us to fail" "I don't understand how we can do all of this!" Stuff like that. That sucked. It was like fending off small animals attacking me, many at a time. All I needed was a big stick. Wham! Bam! Slap! Whack!