Spot the mistake

Do you always tell your students to revise their work prior to handing it in? You know those kids that finish their test in 10 minutes when it should have taken them at least 30 minutes and then its full of silly mistakes since they rushed through it. Well, today, I modeled the reason why you should always revise your work.

Last night my husband invited me to a concert last minute, therefore the evening's plans changed suddenly. Whereas I had planned on attending an info night at school and then going over my lessons, it did not go this way. We had to drop the baby off at his grandma's which meant we sat in traffic for an hour, eat dinner on the fly, go to the concert, pick the baby up and so we got home at 12:30am which is way past my bedtime. I was exhausted and didn't even think about today's lessons, mainly because I was relying on the fact that my student teacher would be doing the lessons. 

So as I was showering (and it so happens that that is always where I remember things or get really great ideas, but of course do not have anything to write them down on), I suddenly remembered that I had said I would teach the first lesson of the day so my student teacher could observe me. I tried to get to school early so I could revise my powerpoint on les pronoms relatifs, I made some changes, but didn't really focus on what I as doing. 

Come lesson time, there I am yapping away at the front and noticing various spelling mistakes on my slides. I have no problem admitting to my mistakes and will gladly point them out to my students, then I challenge them to try and catch my mistakes, and there were plenty of them today! I fessed up. I told my Grade 9s that because I went out on a school night, I did not revise my work and as a result, here I am teaching and having to correct silly spelling mistakes. I said that of course it is normal to make mistakes, but this was unacceptable, because had I read over my slides, I would have caught the silly mistakes and not had to waste class time correcting.

It even got to a point where we made bets to see if my next sentence would have mistakes, and I forgot a question mark which resulted in them winning an extra day to prepare for their vocabulary test. 

Lesson learned on my part!