Feb. 22nd

Back from a 3 day weekend, and we get a 2 hour delay. This screwed up any chance of my planning on what was going on today. We were originally scheduled to have an ISTEP Prep test in mathematics today, but due to the delay, it will be on Thursday now. What made it hard for me to plan at all was the lack of knowledge I had in knowing whether or not I was going to administer the ISTEP Prep test, and if I was even going to have any time in my class to accomplish anything. To top it all off, the teachers had a mandatory ISTEP meeting which resulted in class starting 10 minutes later than the original plan. This gave me even less time for preparation of my 1st period class. It was a day where I basically winged everything.

Pre- Algebra Classes:

It seemed that I administered the ISTEP prep pretty fluently today in my Pre-Algebra Classes. In my 1st hour class I was able to even sort of teach about using the formula of the area of a triangle to find the area of a trapezoid. It was pretty fun. In my 5th Period class I had barely enough time to explain the Countdown to ISTEP worksheet, and the next thing I knew I had run out of time.

Algebra Classes:

These classes are tough during a 2 hour delay. One class is the normal hour long, while the other class is a pathetic 29 minutes. Because of this, I decided to give back the class that had their normal time their 10 minutes of reading at the beginning of class. To remind anyone of why we normally give the students of the 4th period time to read is because they have an hour long class, when most classes are 50 minutes. This gives students a chance to read the AR books, where they get a grade and points based on their test scores of reading comprehension of a book.
Back to the classes though, where I was able to help students better understand their ability with factoring polynomials. They all knew what they were doing, just didn't know how to recognize the easy ones, so when they thought they had to use the box method for bigger numbers, they really only had to use the factoring strategy for the squaring of binomials. This, I think helped them out, and I decided to have them hand in their old work and assign a new worksheet. This one had a small, simple amount of factoring problems, and it seemed like the ease of these problems relieved their stress a little bit. The first worksheet I gave them had many difficult problems with large common factors and large numbers in general. I figured if they learned how to solve these harder problems, it will be easier for them to solve easier problems in the future. I mentioned that I will be having a quiz over this material tomorrow. They didn't look too excited about it, but at least I gave them some kind of warning before I just threw it at them, in case they wanted to review anything.