Thursday: My First Lesson

So today I presented a lesson on Opportunity Cost. Before today, I did not know what the term meant, and now I've researched it inside and out. It takes a surprising amount of time to create a lesson plan. I decided to make Powerpoint slides, so it would be easier to remember each concept I wanted to explain. I started by reviewing scarcity and explaining how the scarcity of time forces us to choose. When choosing between two options it is the benefits of the choice that we didn't make that is our "opportunity cost." I had the students fill out a worksheet where they listed the positive and negatives of two vacations options. They shared their dream vacations and found the opportunity cost of that decision. The global application of opportunity cost is explained in the expression "guns or butter," which means that a country may spend more money on defense at the opportunity cost of what they would be gaining with increased domestic spending. I'm not sure that the students understood that "guns or butter" didn't actually mean guns or butter, but was a metaphor. My cooperative teacher recommended that I speak slower and repeat the definitions. I should have asked each student to explain them to check for understanding. Instead I had them choose a term from the hat, write the definition and pass the term to the person on their right who then shared it with the class. Overall the lesson went well. I need to work on pacing and presenting the content in a clear voice. I also would have loved to teach this lesson to a larger class to work on classroom management.