It's a Wednesday, or the middle of the week, sort of. This week was a 4 day week so technically half way through the week is about 4th period sometime. Anyways, back to what actually happened today.
Pre- Algebra Class
With all the delays and Countdown to ISTEP, I didn't really know where I was going with my lesson plans. I was unprepared for the day and made a lesson plan blindly for a topic on solving for the area of trapezoids. This turned out to be not where me and my cooperating teacher were actually thinking. We decided to go with learning about facts about Polynomials instead. Before this the countdown to ISTEP was a couple of problems on using area, perimeter, and volume of regular geometric shapes (cylinder, rectangular prism, triangle). After that (longer than I expected it to take) I decided to do something I saw in their book that I quickly glanced at. This was how to find the amount of angle degrees on the inside of a polynomial. I thought it was a cool little way to show them how to do this. No matter what shape I drew, I could make triangles on the inside of each shape by connecting corners. I was surprised because both classes picked up on the pattern, realizing that there were always two less triangles than there are sides.
In my 5th period class, one student asked me "Well what about a million sides or infinite sides." I thought this was a great question and then I proceeded to tell the class that this student was looking for a formula to work for any polygon. They thought it was pretty cool and when the class was coming to a close is when I finished the explanation on the formula. Yet again, there are the students that never pay attention but then get mad at me when I don't help them every single time. I think it is just not fair to the people who try and don't understand. Those people deserve my attention. I think all students deserve my attention, I just get to the more deserving first. This class seems to be much more enthused about math in general. They have a lot of energy, and sometimes it is nearly impossible to get their focus in the right direction. Today seemed like one of those days where I had all their attention in the right direction. I even had the normal trouble makers working with me. One of my better days with the class.
Algebra Classes
These classes seem like they are miles ahead in terms of cooperation, which they are. Maturity is an entirely different story when it comes to the difference to the Pre-Algebra classes. Anyways, I should probably focus more towards actually writing this. Welp...I just went on facebook for about 10 minutes there, man I hate that stupid social networking site sometimes. Lost my train of thought..............Oh yeah! These honors kids had about as much difficulty with the countdown to ISTEP problems as the Pre-Algebra classes. I thought it was kind of weird since they had taken the class on most of their 8th grade standards the year before. What was really weird is that none of the students remembered anything about perimeter. Some of them didn't even know what the question was asking. It was really bothering me that they didn't know something from a class they had taken the year before. Not that they didn't know it, but they looked at it like it was something completely new. So this took about 10 minutes longer, in 7th period than I thought it was going to.
Today was the day of my first quiz given in my Algebra classes. Seems like a long time to not give any quizzes or tests, but with all the ISTEP requirements lately, you seem to run out of time and energy. This quiz was on polynomials, mostly factoring, with a few multiplying binomials and dividing polynomials by monomials. I assumed the last three that weren't factoring would be gimme problems. After grading, I was quite surprised by the results. Many students had 8x/8x = 0. This clearly isn't the case because anything divided by itself is 1. They also missed the easy multiplication ones. The averages for the two classes were 68% and 61% respectively. I was extremely disappointed. Mainly because the students made it seem like they understood it. I even went over a little bit at the end of yesterdays class to give them a go ahead on what might be on this quiz.
In other news, I had my first benchmark conference today with my Cooperating Teacher. This went extremely well, we agreed on just about everything. He gave me good pointers on discipline, like following through on stuff, not that I wasn't, but more of a hint for future reference. It was nice to see that he gave me a great grade on my interaction and relationship with the students. I really feel like I have a great relationship with the students. I honestly wish that sometimes, you could just teach the same kids over and over for years, but then they wouldn't experience different teaching styles. I think the relationship with the students is one of the best things you can have as a teacher. It is important to have a solid teacher-student relationship to even gain the respect you would expect. If you don't have a solid relationship, you are going to lose your classes as well as any respect from your students.
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