Day One - The Project Begins

For my one day teaching experience, I choose Day One of the Car Buying Project.  At our school we have block lessons so I had 106 minutes, I was happy not to feel rushed.  As the students were trickling into the computer lab, I had the warm up on the screen.  Speed write the names of as many car as you can.  Most of them willingly took on the challenge.  It was a lot of fun to find who had the most names and to listen to the wide range of cars.  From Tesla & Buggati to the Fiat 500 Pop.

        Next we moved into a lively discussion of driver’s licenses and new cars.  I asked the students to pretend they were able to get a brand new car upon passing the driving test.  After that we moved into car vocabulary.  Discussing important terms and gave details on the different pieces of a MSRP sticker found on car at dealerships. 

I put the matrix the students needed to complete up on the screen and explained that we would be looking at three different price ranges.  I also emphasized that for today’s lesson we would be looking only at new car websites, saving used cars and specialty sites for another day.  Using a manufacturer’s websites I demonstrated the process of researching new cars.  After my demonstration the students were asked to choose their own cars and fill in the matrix.  The rest of the period was spent walking around checking on students to ensure they were progressing smoothly. 

I really enjoyed the opening part of the lesson.  The class had a lot of fun with car names and driver’s licenses and dream cars.  It was nice to get them thinking a little about their future and leave some hints about goal setting and making plans.  Unfortunately it kind of went downhill from there.  Several students felt the need to disagree about the vocabulary and it therefore took a long time and the students were losing the moment.  Looking at the website together did get them re-energized and most of them easily found a website of their own to visit.  However, I did not anticipate how different some of the sites would be.  The very high end sites did not have pricing or other information.  Some sites posted information such as MPG in a prominent spot while others made you hunt for it.  The BMW & Mercedes sites had some much content that they took several minutes to load on our outdated computers.

But more importantly the students had a difficult time with the matrix.  I realized that I did not spend nearly enough time going through it.  There was a lot of confusion as to what to put where.  There was also some conflicting advice from aides.  Next time I will find a better way to present the vocabulary and I will spend more time detailing the matrix.  And lastly I will keep notes of the tricky parts of each website so that we can more easily navigate them.