After a late room change, missing supplies and a lack of working technology, I made it through my first day. Not only made it, but rocked it!
I think one of the main reasons that today went so well was that I was able to view others plans and reflections on their first days. Therefore, I thought I'd post my own reflection on how the day went.
I started out by placing an index card on each group of desks that had a greek letter and its name such as sigma Σ (I should have taken a picture, but I'm new at this.) I stood at the door and handed out cards that only had the greek symbol and asked students to find their group. This worked surprisingly well and encouraged the students to help each other out from the first minute. I'm defiantly going to try something similar next year.
I then introduced myself, gave a brief overview of my background and then tackled the syllabus. This part was fairly boring but I tossed in a few memes throughout the presentation which I think helped. Finally, I introduced the broken circles activity from Math=Love. This went over EXTREMELY well. I thought it was interesting that my general Geometry classes all finished the circles fairly quickly while my Honors classes seemed to really struggle. I think my honors kids are really used to going it alone while the kids who struggle a bit more tend to rely a lot more on each other. This is something I'm defiantly going to have to work on throughout the year.
For our exit ticket, I had the kids pick up index cards where I had them write down the answers to three questions: What are you most nervous about in math this year?, What is one time you thought that math was awesome?, What is one time you thought math was terrible?. I picked up these questions from samjshah's great blog.
So all in all the kids had a great time (I had one student tell me that the class went by really quickly, talk about a complement!) and I couldn't have done it without the great help of all the wonderful people who blog about their time in the classroom.
