Feb. 16th

If I were to pick a day of the week that looks promising, it is always Wednesday. Wednesday is that kind of day that feels like you have gotten through the rough part of the week, and it is also the day were you are thinking only two more days until the upcoming three day weekend. (in this case). Either way you look at it, it seems to be a great day.
Before school, every Wednesday, and including this one, we have our weekly PLC meeting. To this day, I am still unsure exactly what PLC stands for, but I am pretty sure it's not that important to know the actual acronym. This meeting starts at 7:45 and ends at about 8 or 8:05. On this day school starts 5 minutes late, and lets out 5 minutes early. To be honest with you, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but that is how it goes, so I just roll with it.
For my Pre-Algebra classes, it was day two of my Pythagorean Theorem activity. Honestly, most groups couldn't even get it done at the end of this class since the Countdown to ISTEP activities took so long. It seemed that the students seemed to like the activity a lot, even though some took shortcuts and rounded numbers to the nearest whole, even after I shared with them to use decimals and the dashes on the ruler besides the ones used for just the whole numbers. Either way I thought it was somewhat of a successful activity. There were a few groups in each class that did absolutely nothing. This allows me to understand what people cannot be in groups together when they are doing a group activity. My original plan was to have both classes share what they learned, but because of time restraints, I was only able to do this partially with my 5th period class. I had the two groups that finished make a list of objects they see in real world situations, to share tomorrow with the rest of the class how relevant learning about shapes in and how shapes influence our world. This seemed like a great idea and they liked the sound that they were the only ones with this task.

Algebra class was yet another day of Factoring Polynomials. This day, in both classes, the ISTEP activity went fairly quickly, and I spent the entire rest of class doing examples and explaining how a polynomial is factored. It was both very boring and very methodical. One fun thing that happened during the day, though, was the fact that I wore the tie that was given to me on Valentine's Day. The students really seemed to like that fact that I was wearing something that was given to me by one of their classmates. Everyone was glad, especially the girl who gave it to me. She was much more responsive today that she has been in the past. I think this let me know that the stuedents think I am someone that cares about them and the gifts they might give to me throughout now and the 1st week of may. Overall, I would say the day was kind of methodical and boring, nothing really too exciting happened to me or happened in general. I did, however, sub in for another teacher's study hall during one of my prep periods. This was kind of fun and interactive. It was a computer classroom, and when students are there normally, they are allowed to play games on the computer as long as they have completed whatever homework they had brought with them. I met a few new students and they seemed to gain a liking to me. It is nice to just sit down and interact with students instead of preaching to them about math every once in a while.
After school, a few students had asked me if I could stay after to help them with factoring polynomials, and of course I obliged. Two students stayed and I helped them until about 4 o'clock. It was nice to sort of bond with these two students, because it seems like I pick on them sometimes in the classroom. They asked me personal questions that, of course, I could not answer, but came up with answers that were appropriate and reasonable. Its a great day for weather, so I am going outside for a little bit today.