Tomorrow, my geometry students will continue working constructions. I will staple rosters to the wall by my desk and note to whom I have to loan a compass. I will have a helper student distribute them. It annoys me having to distribute them. I will NOT tell them how to do ANY of them. "You can look it up online if you get stuck," I will say.
To my period 4, whom I may or may not have been exceedingly petulant with today, I will perhaps explain my concern about standards, and having high standards. But I'll try to bring it back to myself and say that I really have high standards for myself, and am changing old habits, and focusing on the positive, in myself and in others. I will re-state my standards for participation in the class, but I will stick with this lesson plan on constructions. It is a discovering type of curriculum, and I have to accept that, and emphasize that, and remind them that they might find this difficult but that it's supposed to be.
In Algebra, well, unless anything cool pops up on twitter, I think they might do a multiple choice worksheet for test review. The only thing they learned this week was combining like terms, which made it kind of a bleh week ... I mean we did have a work packet that they were to have done in partners today which ... None of them really got their teeth into. A colleague of mine cooked it up and she was proud enough of it, and I was impressed enough to consider myself covered for these 90-minute periods BY it ... And yet, I didn't manage to really sell it properly to ANY of my classes these last two days. Didn't know the right questions to ask, or something.
Maybe I'll introduce graphing instead, and give the worksheet for homework. Maybe I'll make the worksheet into a contest, and the winner will get to play the mrnussbaum.com/stockshelves game that gives them practice with the coordinate plane. Whomever's playing can be viewed by the rest of the class via projector. How might the worksheet game work? Well ... maybe each group of four gets a white board ... And they write the first five answers on it ... There's a game called "Rounds" another teacher here uses; I could try to do something like that.
I just went looking for more problems to send them home with to practice on for tomorrow's test, and I found more than enough. Which is a good thing. Gotta remind myself. Head's aching a little right now. I'm going to flip the seating chart around Period 6. We've got some hooligans in there. Nothing I can do about that. I mean, I didn't raise 'em. Right? Sigh. That's all I got. These block days, these 95-minute periods ... I need to plan my energy for them; I need to ... I need ...
Great speaker, Dylan William, at the NCTM High School Institute over the summer, talked about how there are so many failures to learn from in teaching--and therefore the opportunity for so many little wins to overcome those failures. On that note, I hope I learned something here. Over and out.
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