Day 111: Dead Man Walkin'

Tuesdays are SO easy. To be finished for the day at 10:45 a.m. ... Unbelievable! Anyway. I was going to move on from there to start complaining about my Wednesday schedule, but that can wait till ... Wednesday!

Today I had only two classes, and didn't have a whole lot prepared for either of them. Interesting how ... my first year, I was just so conditioned to having these antagonistic behavior issues in every class that I barely even had a minute to focus on curriculum, on what's being taught. Now, this year, that's not the case. I have fairly well-behaved classes 80% of the time, and so much less of an excuse for subpar curriculum.

I'm sorry, I'm a little shaken. I just -- <censored> ...

Back to today: In Geometry I kept it light, my rationale being that they have their project to work on, a project that I myself need to work on ... if that makes any sense. (It doesn't). But we're doing some review; we're building confidence, is my idea.

Algebra went less swell, in that I tried to introduce two concepts, and the order in which I introduced them was questionable. I was going with the textbook; Pearson's chapter on Radical Expressions starts with a lesson on the Pythagorean Theorem. But what might have been better (and I'll do it this way when I re-do the lesson tomorrow) would have been to do the introduction to radicals first--what they are, how to simplify them ... and then to do the Pythagorean Theorem second (as the most-obvious APPLICATION of those radicals).

A new thing I did that I liked: I screen-capped some problems from the Internet and used them as warm-ups. A new thing I thought of afterwards that might be ... better: on these days with 95-minute block periods, there ought to be some type of assessment, formal or informal. Otherwise I really don't know how they're doing with the material, whether they're getting it or not. There ought to be some accountability with that assessment, too--something where they get credit for participating so I at least have participation happening.

I'm going to take my sorry butt to the copy room now. Dead man walkin'.

I've got to add something. This is clearly inappropriate to be blogging about in a public forum. Why am I so inclined to hit the publish button anyway? ... Okay, that's better.