Revisit: Classroom management

This past week I subbed for three days for one of my CTs.  Out of all the classes that she supervises, the hardest one for me to do was a study hall.  One reason why this was the hardest class for me was because it took forever to get over.  The other reason why it was hard for me was because it was all classroom management, and this is the biggest thing that I need to work on.  In the class aren't the type of students that will just get out work and start working on it.  I constantly had to tell students to turn around and stop talking, or to get something out and work on it.  Still no matter what I told them they would just go back to messing around and not being productive.  I had no idea what to say to them that would make them get to work.  Looking back at it, I should have disciplined one student at the beginning of the class to make them realize that I was serious and put some weight behind my words.  This is actually the one thing I need to do with all my classes when they are getting out of hand,  I think that as time goes on and I become more comfortable with disciplining, my classroom management will get a lot better.    

Inscribed angle lesson

The past couple of days, I have been teaching a lesson on inscribed angles.  The lesson was something that the PLC had planned out already.  So I didn't know how well that it was going to do with this.  For this, we had the students use a circle with 36 dots on the circle evenly spaced apart.  First, we had the students draw an equilateral triangle in the circle.  Then we had them find the relationship between the inscribed angle and the arc that it makes.  Then to make sure the pattern is true for a couple of other cases, we had the students do the same with a square and hexagon.  The one thing that I was worried about was if the students were going to be able draw an equilateral triangle other than by "it looks like one."  Luckily, there were a couple of students that I could call on to explain how they did it.  Then after that the rest of the lesson went pretty smoothly.  This was way better than a lesson that I taught in my practicum on the same subject.  In my practicum lesson, I had the students use protractors to find what the arc measures were.  The protractor skill of some students aren't really up to par.  So it was nice to have the circle where it was easy to tell what the measure of the arc was.  This is definitely a lesson I will use in my geometry lesson next year.

And in the spirit of the event that happened this week, I'll end this post with a motto from Wahoo Schools...
IT'S A GREAT DAY TO BE A WARRIOR

Job Search

Since we didn't have school this week, I thought about writing about my experiences with the job search.  During spring break, I had my first interview.  I had no idea of what to expect when walking into the interview.  I tried to tell myself not to be nervous, but no matter how hard I tried, I was still really nervous.  Luckily, I was provided the list of questions I could look at during the interview in the order that they were going to ask them.  This was very helpful because I could kind of prepare my answers in my head while the interview team was writing things down.  Hopefully this is the case for every interview I have because I don't know what I would have done without it.  The other thing that I didn't like about having my first interview was that I didn't know how well I did because I don't have any other experiences to base it off of.  So when people asked me how the interview went. I didn't know what to tell them because I had no clue on if I did good or bad.  I didn't think I did too well in the interview.  I was a nervous wreck and thought I could have done way better.  Luckily, someone I know is good friends with one of the interviewers and they said I didn't do too bad, so fingers crossed that this will be the only interview that I have to do!