Be Ready to Switch Gears

I labeled each accordingly, then drew a connecting lines to each field.&nbsp;&nbsp;“The next step is to determine whether the relationship between these two is a “one to many relationship,&nbsp;many to one relationship, or many to many relationship” As more eyes turned towards the board, I caught a glimpse of what appeared to be a sigh of relief come over Daniel’s face.&nbsp;&nbsp;

During the next 20 minutes&nbsp;students were laughing together as we&nbsp;brainstormed the attributes of several fields to add to&nbsp;our diagram, and debated relationships and cardinality (1-1, 1-many or many-to-many) as we continued to sketch the rapidly growing Entity Relationship Diagram.

<a href="https://pixabay.com/en/service/terms/#usage">CC0 Creative Commons</a> images <a href="https://pixabay.com/en/switch-gear-train-switching-rail-2496345/">https://pixabay.com/</a> Free for commercial use&nbsp; No attribution required WeVideo Essentials ERD Images and Video Clips from Lucie deLaBruere

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Be Ready to Switch Gears

Be Prepared to Switch Gears to Meet Students Where They're At

<a href="https://twitter.com/techsavvygirl">by Lucie deLaBruere</a>

But I didn’t throw in the towel.&nbsp;Instead, I quickly refocused the lesson on what was happening in the room.&nbsp;&nbsp;

“Is a prom date required to go to the prom?” I asked. Some of the&nbsp;eyes turned towards me with a quizzical look. Someone muttered “Well you could go with a friend?” “Could you go alone?” I asked.

“yeah , I guess.”&nbsp;answered a sophomore girl, probably hoping that was not her fate. I drew two rectangles on the board and labeled one&nbsp;promGoer and the other promDate. “Okay, so it sounds like promGoer is a required field, but&nbsp;promDate is an optional field”.

Can you share a time when you had to switch gears in order to meet students where they were at on that day?

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I realized that this was Friday before prom, and that the girls were already starting to skip out of school early for appointments at the hair salon.&nbsp;

It didn’t take me long to realize that the lesson I had planned was not going to trump all the brewing anticipation, emotions, worries, and excitement about the upcoming weekend.

"There are days when no matter how engaging the lesson is, your students are NOT present in the lesson.&nbsp;It’s always a good idea to be tuned into the events in students’ lives and go with the flow rather than fight the current."

Right after lunch on a spring day, I was at the whiteboard with different colored markers getting ready to explain Entity Relationship Diagrams to a group of high school students.&nbsp;&nbsp;I had created a lesson that I felt pretty good about.

My students were on track to take the Oracle SQL certification exam later that month. I had planned out the perfect example to help them learn and practice this skill.

I remember being stunned that Amanda had shouted out loud in my class. I mean “what was that about?”&nbsp;What made her feel that she could interrupt class that way. I remember feeling a little embarrassed for Daniel. I had no idea who Susie was but I’m sure neither Daniel nor Sue appreciated their relationship being called attention to in the middle of class.

I remember trying to refocus the class to the emerging diagram on the whiteboard,

when all of a sudden I grabbed the eraser...

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I remember&nbsp;drawing the colored rectangles on the board representing each entity in the database I wanted them to create.&nbsp;Just as I reached for a blue marker, I heard Amanda shout across the room. “Daniel - Why aren’t you taking Susie to the prom?”

Has this happened to you?

Class Distracted

The strange thing is I can’t for the world of me remember what topic I had planned to use as a model to teach those students how to draw a basic ER diagram. but I have a vivid memory of modeling the Prom scenario with my students. And I must admit that I felt pretty proud of my teacher skills that day and the quick thinking that refocused the class, saved the lesson, and probably turned into a deeper understanding of Entity Relationship Diagram.

And by the end of class, I stopped being annoyed at Amanda for her outburst, and decided to take it as a compliment that my classroom felt like a safe place for students to speak what’s on their minds.

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