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.
Thursday, August 11, 2016
Friday, July 29, 2016
Entering the MTBoS: Why hello there!
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.
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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