I've been meaning to start this blog for awhile now. The blogs and tweets that I have read through the MTBoS over the past few years have not only inspired me to pursue a teaching degree, but also helped me to successfully obtain that degree. The ideas and resources I have discovered have helped me during my student teaching and have already given me many ideas (sometimes too many!) for how to start my first year.
Since teachers start back to school next week, I decided that I should go ahead and get everything set up so that it will be easy for me to write about my experiences not only to allow me to reflect on how everything is going, but also to just maybe help other teachers and teachers-to-be.
So far I have been focusing on getting everything set up for the first couple of days of school. I'm going to be teaching Algebra 1 and Honors Geometry so I'm going to have a lot of freshmen who are as new to the school as I am! I'm trying to think of all the procedures that I need to cover, as well as planning out a general outline of the school year.
The main thing that I am trying to work out right now is my homework policy. I remember when I was a student I always hated huge numbers of really simple problems, but I also had friends that hated it when they received fewer, more difficult problems that they found frustrating. I've been trying to think of a way to allow students to choose how much practice they need while still holding them accountable for that practice. I really want to move over to standards based grading at some point, but I feel that for my first year I would quickly get overwhelmed so I'm trying to think of a halfway point.
We are on a block schedule and only meet three times per week, so currently I am planning on giving students a list of suggested practice problems at the end of every class that they will be quizzed on the next period. We will then take the first 6 minutes of the next class taking a quiz on three of the problems from the previous assignment. Students will then take the next 3-4 minutes looking over their quiz from the last class period and discussing it with their group in order to determine what mistakes (if any) were made. I can use this time to look over their current quiz and determine what deficiencies (if any) exist, and adjust my lesson as needed. I'm hoping this will encourage students to try and understand the concepts rather then simply copy down answers. I would like to stick to really basic, level 1 type questions on the practice problems and mini quizzes and focus on more in depth conversations and projects during class.
I'm a little concerned that the students may see this as a way to skip all work outside class rather then as an encouragement to practice for understanding and therefore score terribly on their quizzes, but if I've learned anything from all the blogs I've read, it's to never be afraid to try something new.
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