Ryli Rutt – Social Studies Education Internship

I am Ryli Rutt. I am interning with Robert Schneider, a high school history teacher at Garden Spot High School. The class I intern with is 11th-grade civics and government. I took the AP version of that class when I was a junior, which comes in handy when I need to teach or help the students. My main duties on a normal basis are to sit and observe the class and the teaching methods Mr. Schnieder uses. I also grade assignments and tests, teach lessons, help students, and do any other work Mr. Schneider gives me.

With an education internship, we are required to teach at least 2 lessons. One of those lessons must be about 10-15 minutes long and the other must be about an hour long. So far I have taught my first 10-15 minute lesson. When trying to decide what lesson I wanted to teach, Mr. Schneider gave me a lot of freedom. To help me prepare, he told me the lesson could be a quick and simple introduction to a new topic the class was going to learn about. I chose to do an introduction to how a bill becomes a law. I did my research and watched many videos provided by Mr. SChneider in his Canvas module for that topic and also videos I found on my own to help aid me in creating my lesson plan. I took some aspects from the original lesson Mr. Schneider had on canvas and used my own ideas. My lesson started off with me asking a few questions to see what the class knew and then I jumped in with a fun little schoolhouse rock video. After the video, I went over the steps the video provided for how a bill becomes a law in more detail. After I finished my lesson a few of the students told me that I did a really good job teaching and they understood everything I taught.

Along with teaching and grading assignments, Mr. Schneider has some side projects for me. One of which is to decorate the bulletin board in the back of his room with something that will be helpful to the students based on what they will learn. After a lot of thought I landed on the idea of putting the major court cases the course covers on the board with what makes the court case a landmark case. I picked 9 cases that I thought were the most important for the students to know and I turned them into a newspaper article for a fun decorative design. Each “newspaper” has 2 pictures of the people or items from the case, a summary of the case details, the ruling and the dissent, and then what that case establishes that makes it important. I think these cases being put up in the room for the students to see will be very helpful because the cases are very important to the course. Anytime they need to know why a certain law was established or what court case relates to the topic they are learning, they can always see them.

This internship is enjoyable and was very helpful in aiding my decision as to what I want to do in the future. After some time in this career field, I have figured out that I don’t enjoy it that much and I wouldn’t want to do this as my future career. It takes a lot to keep students engaged and wanting to learn as well as a lot of work and effort to make exciting lessons. I feel like I would get very bored teaching the same thing repeatedly every day and not having much change in my daily routine. With all that being said, I very much do enjoy this internship, and I’m very happy to have had the opportunity to experience this career.