Feb. 15th

Fwew, got that rough holiday out of the way and onto another full day of teaching.

In my two Pre-Algebra classes I was teaching the Pythagorean Theorem, for both the ISTEP Countdown as well as my regular teaching class. This helped, instead of spending 25 minutes for the countdown and then trying to teach a regular class, I was able to combine the two and create one lesson. In 1st hour, I taught like I would any other class. After class I realized I had a lot of lost students. I talked with my cooperating teacher, and he had mentioned that I needed to slow down for this class. What I think is a pretty normal pace for students that age is still a little fast for this class to comprehend, as a whole. Some students got what I was talking about almost immediately, but as a whole I had moved too fast. He gave me suggestions for my other class and they worked perfectly. The other class moved much smoother and it seemed all the students knew how to use the theorem, but had trouble with the actual algebraic process to solve for the missing side.

My two algebra classes didn't go as smoothly as I would have liked. 4th period had trouble with the countdown assignment, so that cut into their time. In fact, so did 7th period. Most were still having trouble with factoring in general so I decided to give them a large "review" worksheet of factoring polynomials. Well, it turned out that none of the students could recognize what to look for. I tried assigning them just the evens to get them thinking. I wasn't going to collect it for homework, considering both only had enough time for one or two problems to even look at. Overall it seemed like there was a lot of work to behold on factoring polynomials.

I was asked constantly this day, by the girls, either where my new tie was, or if I had a good Valentines Day, followed by that look with the raising eyebrows over and over.....I ignored those questions basically...especially ones with the eyebrow raising.