The one day just about every man on the planet has either paid for chocolate or flowers for a girl, or guy, that he loves or has feelings for, Valentines Day! I was slightly dreading this day, on the other hand. Not because I don't have a whole lot of money to spend on my girlfriend, but because I was certain I was going to get some weird Valentines or something throughout the school day. Not only was it this fun, yet nerve-wrecking, holiday, it was also the first day I was taking over all the classes at one time. Just another reason to be a little nervous throughout the day.
Countdown to ISTEP today was a simple page on completing problems with the use of order of operations. All my classes must complete the countdown work, however, my honors Algebra classes usually take little to no time to complete this task.
1st period class roles around and I was teaching the students how to approximate the square root of a number that is not a square root. On Friday, I had given both of my Pre-Algebra classes, including this one, a multiplication chart up to 25. I showed them how they could use this when trying to decide when the square root they were approximating by which perfect squares it was closest to. Believe me, it is a lot easier to explain it up in front of a classroom than it is to try and explain what I did. While I was teaching I noticed a few students nodding off and sleeping, and it's not because they were tired, but simply because they didn't want to listen. I attempted to wake up or keep the students' heads up and paying attention, but my efforts failed. As usual, once I gave them their assignment, they were clueless as to how they were to complete such a task. Today I helped them, because I give every person the benefit of the doubt. At the end of this class, I handed out Valentines that were simply from Mr. Kerwin, with no specific student getting any certain Valentine. I was a little nervous handing out valentines, thinking students could think the wrong thing if their valentine had a certain phrase on it, so I was advised by a good friend to hand them out "blindly" and give them to all my students with the only thing I write is From: Mr. Kerwin. This worked superbly, my students in first hour loved the fact that they got valentines, since it seemed like many students don't get valentines on this lovers' holiday.
My next teaching class was my 4th hour Algebra I class. We were still working on factoring Polynomials. After the quick 10 minute Countdown to ISTEP, we were right into questions they had about Friday's assignment: factoring using the box method. Mostly there were some questions about the syntax of the activity packet itself, but once I cleared this up, there was really only one question about one of the problems in this packet. I went over it and explained how to factor it, and how it can be related to the previous style of factoring we had done. Today's new task was factoring Special Case polynomials. It seemed to go pretty well, they were just having a hard time determining when this little shortcut would be used, or, more often than not, how to recognize it. I cleared this up in class and gave them their assignment. In this class, I received a Garfield tie as a Valentine's Day gift from a few girl students, or so it seemed. I thought it was a nice and cute gesture. When another student asked "Why a tie?" The two girls that physically gave me the tie said it was because my university supervisor said to where a tie. I handed out my valentines and once again the students were enthused and excited to get my funny and cute Disney, Spongebob, and Cars valentines.
5th period roles around and this class seems to be my class that is going to be the most challenging, discipline wise. It's right after lunch and students tend to be a little more rambunctious, and hard to keep focused. This is my other Pre-Algebra class and they were slightly farther ahead than my other class. Rather than move on I decided to enrich this class on approximating square roots, moving into their books for more problems on estimating square roots. This class flew by, they seemed to be working with me extremely well, this looks bright and fun in the future. There are a handful of students that seem they will ruin it for the rest of the class, but me and my teacher seem to have a discipline plan for that kind of behavior. Handed out my valentines and later found a few ripped on the ground. A little disappointing because I went out of my way to be nice to them.
My last class of the day is another Algebra class. They seem to have more questions about factoring using the box method than my other class seemed to have. Well after I answered quite a few questions about the box method I collected the activity and moved on to special cases. It seemed that this class was having tons of trouble with factoring polynomials. Well usually, I allow most of my classes to work with partners or groups to help eachother with homework. I decided to grade the activity packet, for both a completion and correctness grade. After I saw the effort put forth by this class, I just took a correctness grade. Most of the students had not even put in the answers that I had gone over in class. The students who usually pay attention and do well did fine. It was those "on the fence" students who didn't put forth any effort. I was pretty upset after their class was over. Even on this day, I got pretty mad because students kept interrupting class by talking or making unnecessary comments.
Overall it was a fun and exciting day. Thus started a new chapter in the life of Joe Kerwin.
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