Chapter 7 "Teaching Difficult Academic Material"

"Sometimes teachers think they're the first one to teach you something. They don't realize that we might have been listening for five years to someone else that wasn't you" (Cushman, p 124)I guess this goes to show just how important it is for a teacher to find out about students prior knowledge on a subject before they teach the lesson. Preassessments tend to do the trick when trying to learn what students already know about a subject.
While observing my mentor teacher he decided to teach a lesson on the food pyramid and why certain foods are needed more than others. Most of the students were freshmen so they had probably had at least one maybe two health classes before this one. So my mentor teacher begins discussing this topic, and he thinks that the class is really understanding this subject because they are able to answer all of his questions. Finally about mid way through the lecture one students was completely off task, and when my mentor teacher asked him why he wasn't paying attention he told him that it was because he'd already heard this information about a thousand times before and it was becoming rather old. Most of the other students agreed with this student.