My class

My first period class is amazing. It is all seniors in CP Calculus, and there are only 9 of them in here. Since there are 9 students and two teachers (my mentor and I), everyone stands a very fair chance of understanding the material and receiving help. My students are also very cooperative. I assign them to groups and they work with whoever with no complaints. This is great. We played a review game and everyone honestly worked together and helped each other. This made me so happy. There are a few students that have made A's on everything. There is only one student who is a bit of an underachiever and one other student who constantly falls behind. However, with our help and the help of her peers, this student is able to catch up.

Math...interesting?

I got the chance to teach the entire day last week. I was in control of all three classes. I was extremely excited. I knew that calculus would run smoothly. It is a great bunch of kids and there are only 10 of them. I was not so sure about third and fourth period Finite. During my plan period, I looked at the notes that were prepared for class. It looked just like any other normal day. However, I really wanted to engage the class and make things interesting. To do this, my mentor teacher and I came up with some really interesting example problems. I was supposed to teach exponential growth and decay involving half life and doubling. Here are the problems we came up with:

1. The zombie population doubles every 6 hours. If there are only 4 zombies at this moment, how many zombies will there be in 2 days?
2. Welcome to college, girls! The freshman boys are AWAY from home and NO LONGER BATHING. The number of guys you would even consider dating is dropping by one-half every week. If you had an initial list of 50 potential hotties, how many would still be on your list after 28 days?

The last example problem really excited the class. The students really enjoyed it and everyone got into it. I ended the lecture with a last thought. I told the boys to keep showering. I told the girls that math can help them find their "hotties."

Overall, this was a very successful day. The main thing that I learned was that if we can make math interesting, useful, and realistic, then the students will pay more attention and be more involved.

Too easy

I remember being a high school student. It was fun and I didn't have to work very hard at all. However, I feel like I still took tests very seriously.
Some of my high school students in my finite classes take the tests serious, but they do not take advantage of all of the resources I provide them. For example, every test has had a review that looks very very very similar to the actual test (i.e. they have the same type of problems exept different numbers and answers). Thus, there are no surprises on the test. If my teachers had done this for me, I would have been so happy. However, some of my students do not even finish their whole review. Then, they miss problems on the test. There has been a direct correlation between the test scores and whether or not the review was completed. Some even ask if they can finish the review after the test. But this misses the whole point of letting the review prepare you for the test.
Overall, this just shocks me a little. My plan is to keep providing the students with a review. The review will not be accepted after the test. My mentor teacher grades the reviews pretty harshly too. I plan to have a talk with my class and let them know how fortunate they are. This kind of work ethic will not cut it in college. Maybe I should give them a test without a review?

Reflection 1

So far, my experience in my classroom has been really great. I am really enjoying seeing the teaching side of high school.
There was one experience that struck me in a surprising way. I have two senior finite math classes. As we went over a new section, the students needed to find the x-intercept. I thought that this would be a review for them (after all, these students all passed algebra 1, geometry, algebra 2.....and they're seniors!). The whole class was lost and could not do it. OK, so we probably needed to review a little. That was fine. I taught the class how to set a "y=mx+b" equation equal to zero and solve for "x." These students were completely lost. They could not remember their basic algebra skills (move b to the other side and divide by m). This struck me as surprising because these students will be in college next year and their professors will not take the time to review something as simple as that. This class will be more work than I thought.