Mar. 14th

Monday Monday...blah dahhh blah dah dah dah....so good toooo me.

It's another Monday, and another day I expect my students to be pretty laid back and non-responsive, but to my avail, they were extremely talkative and responsive to what I was teaching.

Pre-Algebra
I was ending my time with volume and hoping to get a touch into surface area. The volume I spent my time on was volume of pyramids and cones. Hopefully, I got it across to the students that the volume of a pyramid is the same formula as the volume of a prism, except that a pyramid is 1/3 the volume of the prism. It seemed like they understood where this was coming from. I gave them in class. I was also told during 5th period that I am like a vacuum because I suck all the fun out of the class. If you know my 5th period class, you can understand why I might "take the fun out of it." I have to spend twice as much time as any other class trying to get them to quiet down and pay attention for a few minutes. It is nearly impossible to get them on task right away. It seems that whenever I transition at all, they just immediately get to talking and stop listening to me right away. I have to wait and listen, and I think I am running out of patience with this class. I have given them many opportunities to work in groups or do activities, and without fail, they barely work. Then they have no idea what to do after I explain what was going on because they weren't listening while I explained it. Many students in both of these classes have a lot of missing assignments, resulting in very low and disappointing percentage grades.

Algebra Classes

Like I mentioned on Friday, my teacher and I discussed giving the class a problem that was similar to what we had been working on for the last few days. This did not go nearly as well as I had hoped. I was hoping just to touch on this for about 10 minutes and move on to solving quadratics by factoring, but of course this didn't happen. In fact, both classes spent almost all of the class time on these two bell work problems, It was very frustrating and I was ready to move on so I can be done with my LAMP unit, because the 10 days that are supposed to be for a lamp project are really more like 15 or 20 days. OH well I guess that I will learn from this as I move on to become a full fledged paid employee of the state of whatever state I end up living in.