This was our last lesson to teach for the semester. It was a really good class covering symbolism in Araby by James Joyce. Going through the story and trying to figure out the symbols and what they could mean was interesting in itself as it challenged both my teaching partner and myself as to what things could mean and why he chose those images. 

One that we noticed was the recurrence of light and so we narrowed our focus on that otherwise the lesson could have been longer than the two hours it is supposed to run for. 

At the start of the class, we discovered that not many students had done their homework, which in my eyes made the lesson less effective for those who hadn’t, but for the few students that had, they were able to take lots of new information to take and reexamine their reading. When I start teaching in my own class, it will be easier to amend my lesson plan and take into account for students not doing the assigned reading. In this class we did counter this by having one of the students who had done the reading give a brief summary, but I feel as though it wasn’t enough as we couldn’t fully engage the class, or at least that’s how it felt by the lack of responses from students.