Feb. 24th

It's Thursday, and today is not only a day for Countdown to ISTEP, but it is also the monthly ISTEP prep assessment test, or STI test. So I basically did absolutely no teaching.


In first hour, my CT (cooperating teacher, which is what I will refer him as from now on) jumped in to help me teach the class the countdown to ISTEP problems. I didn't really like that this happened, especially since I hadn't yet collected all of the ISTEP Prep Tests from the students. He thought I was just going to let the students try it all on their own. We talked after class and mentioned that as well as how he was going to start ducking out more often, to see how I am with the class without him around.
After the 1st hour class, I basically did all handing out of papers, collecting, and going over the countdown to ISTEP problems, which consisted of 2 problems of finding perimeter, area, or volume of irregular shapes that have some sort of missing side. One problem had the use of Pythagorean Theorem to find a missing side of a trapezoidal figure. It was a pretty useful set of problems for all the students to complete.
In my Algebra classes, I luckily had enough time to hand out the quiz and talk about what silly mistakes they all made. They realized after we started talking about it. It is hard for them to notice when something is factorable right now, and I said there is nothing wrong with always using box method, as inconvenient as it can be sometimes. Many of them realized their silly mistakes they missed. Some were confused when they got counted off for a "right answer." Their answer was similar for me asking for something to be completely reduced and their answer is 3/6. Well this can be reduced, and since I asked for simplest form, they missed one out of 2 of the points on those problems, which was everyone but 4 or 5 students from both Algebra classes combined. As an entire school day, I thought it kind of sucked since I really did no teaching. We are already in a crunch for time due to the curriculum calendar, and I really haven't done a whole lot since the start of Countdown to ISTEP. Tomorrow is the last day for the countdown because next week is all ISTEP. I had one student ask me "Since we are taking ISTEP next week, can we just hang out in class?" I chuckled a little and said that we wouldn't. Though some days I think a cool video might be something I might do, lol.