Ahhh....finally, I had an entire school day with class periods that were sort of normal. I say sort of because of the countdown to ISTEP that was at the beginning of each class. The one downfall to this countdown is that it should only last about 20 minutes each class, allowing for teachers to conduct their normal class after all is said and done. In teaching nothing goes as planned, and in my first class the activity that should,or was planned to, take only 20 minutes ended up taking up the entire 50 minute class period. Luckily the other Pre-Algebra class finished the task in about 35 minutes, leaving only a few short minutes to work on the days work of approximating square roots. My accelerated math class went exceptionally well today since grades were being sent home to parents today.
When it came to the Algebra classes that I had taken over, the countdown to ISTEP task went quite well and took a mere 10 minutes at the start of class. The countdown for today was the use of Order of Operations and the distributive property. It was just a few problems that involved variable expressions and equations. The lesson I was teaching that day was factoring trinomials where the lead coefficient is not 1. If you don't know what that is, look it up online. I explained to them the process with using the box method. At first all was going well, and then all hell broke loose. It seemed that they got completely lost in the middle of my explanation. During my explanation, I even mentioned important things about the box method and how it works. Luckily I was prepared, mentally, to overcome such a struggle and did so with ease. I think the problem was the lack of examples or the fact the process was different than the process we had used before. The "activity" I gave them was something written by someone else but came with 8 steps on how to factor a quadratic trinomial using the box method and a few exploration problems to complete. My original plan would have had them finish that in class and try a few problems out of the text book. Like I said before, and you'll hear it a million times from any teacher, nothing ever goes as planned, and this packet ended up taking longer than expected so the assignment turned out to be just the worksheet. One mistake I made today was something I learned from my 6th grade Social Studies teacher. "Never assume, because it makes an ass out of u and me." Now this wasn't my quote since I censored it a bit and used the word butt instead. I realized after I had said it, that I probably shouldn't have said it, but it's in the past now. I am just hoping the principal's daughter in that class doesn't tell her father what she learned about assume.
In my last two classes, things went smoothly. The ISTEP countdown took only about 35 minutes to complete in 5th hour, allowing some time and instruction for the use of approximating square roots that aren't perfect squares. It seemed the students understood how to approximate the decimal point. I helped one student and he came up with an answer for the square root of 60, and he decided it would be 7.7. In this exercise we were only approximating to the tenths place. I asked him if he thought his answer made sense, and he wasn't sure what to think. I showed him on a calculator what the square root of 60 was. It obviously isn't as simple as 7.7, but it helped him understand that his answer isn't going to be perfect, but it's going to be close. 7th hour seems to be my most interactive and joyful class. Yesterday, as a joke, a girl snapped her fingers toward me in a Z motion. I'm almost positive she was doing it to her friend, but I asked her "Did you just Z me?" I like to joke around with the kids, it loosens things up. I wish I had more of a mean side, but I guess that will come in time. Anyways, today she came in and went "Mr. Kerwin!" and pulled it off again, completely joking and I was having a good time with it.
Like I said yesterday, I inadvertently made fun of a girl's accessories, so today, she got me back with a few words of her own. "Mr. Kerwin, your shirt looks like an old man would wear it." I know she was kidding, and I laughed about it, because she knows that I wasn't purposely trying to hurt her feelings the day before, or at least I thought.
I've been student teaching for 5 weeks already, and it seems like I have barely been there. I would like to say I am ready for the real thing, but I cannot even describe to you how much work a teacher in the Muncie School Corporation does unless you see it for yourself. Since Muncie is a "failing" school, or a school that has poor standardized test scores, teachers are forced to follow strict curriculum and an even stricter enrichment and remediation process to get students to pass ISTEP. It seems like everything is all about the tests, and the the corporation does not care about the students, but rather how much funding they can get the following year.
Goal(s): My goal is to eventually get to the point where I can be completely comfortable in front of all the classes. The Algebra classes were easy to step in front of since most of those students are not discipline problems.
I also hope that I am not a teacher that assigns homework on Fridays. I know this probably isn't the best idea during student teaching or even my first year of teaching. I think right now I am going to stick with small assignments over the weekend, because I believe the weekend is for family and fun, and not for work.
Favorite class?: If I were to choose a favorite class (I feel like a parent that refuses to pick a favorite son or daughter) I would pick either my 2nd hour class or my 7th hour class. I love the one-on-one interaction I can give the students in the Accelerated Math class, and I love the interaction I have with the 7th period.
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