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!

Parental Interaction

I haven't seen that much parental interaction with my CT.  One thing that my CT does is at a certain point in the chapter that we're on, she'll send out an general e-mail to parents of students that are missing more than 4 assignments.  From what I've seen, I'm not sure that this does too much to get the students motivated.  It may do something with just the kids because it seems like it's something that my CT said she has been doing for a while.  I also think she wouldn't do it if she doesn't see an impact that comes from it.  There is also one student whose parents are very involved with their kids learning.  My CT is in contact at least once a week and telling them how he is doing in the class.  There have been a couple of times where my CT has had to call home to parents.  Once was about a kid who wasn't paying attention in class and would just look at a calculator the whole class period.  She had to call home and tell the parents what was going on.  She found out some information on why the kid was struggling in class.  From this, I think that it is best to call home when there are behavior issues that are going on in class, and not necessarily when the student is falling behind on work (unless it's really really bad).

Hearing Impaired students

The topic for this week is the accommodations for students with special needs.  I am very fortunate to get to work with a couple of kids that are hearing impaired.  One of the students is partially deaf, so he can hear and talk but usually uses the translator.  Then the other hearing impaired student is completely deaf.  They're both in the same class together so we have a translator in my classroom for them.  The one thing that is hard for me is when I am giving a lesson and I'm trying to speed through some stuff to get it all in, the translator has to stop me and tell me to slow down.  That can kind of screw with the pace of the class.  The other hard thing is that you can't communicate with them yourself.  I think sometimes with the translator, some things may get lost in translation and may not get to the student the way you wanted it to.  Luckily the translator that they have is pretty good at math so she does a good job of trying not to change what I am saying up a whole lot.  With that being said, I really enjoy having those students and their translator in there.  They are all teaching my how to sign, so they're are a couple of things that I can sign now.

Assessment and paper load

First there are a couple of great things that one of my CTs does for a students self-assessment.  One is for the homework.  She usually has them up a one sentence summary of of how they felt about the assignment.  Usually, students just write it was fine.  However, there are sometimes where a students writes "I really didn't get this" or "This was hard for me."  I think even that little of a statement is very useful.  If they say either of those, we can pinpoint who's getting and who isn't getting the material.  We can then look out for them while they are in class.  One other thing that my CT while going test is have the students fill out a chart on the problems they got wrong.  Some of the choices are "silly mistake" or "I didn't understand what it was asking for" etc.  I think this helps us especially with when we take the cumulative.  This also helps us pinpoint what we need to go over before they are tested over it again.

One thing that we do to reduce the paper load isn't really reducing the amount of paper at all.  We reduce the amount of work for grading.  What we do in our classroom is that we grade 6 random questions in the assignment.  We grade them on accuracy.  Grading this way usually takes only about 10 min.  I think that this is a good balance of getting students feedback and not spending the whole night grading one homework assignment. 

Pacing

Pacing is something that I have trouble with.  First off, it would be helpful if I could read a clock.  In one class, I looked up at the clock and thought that I had 10 min left, bur in reality it turned out that I had about 3.  So that's one thing that may be helpful.  But in all seriousness, I think that it is better to be over prepared and have too many things to go over.  It also isn't that hard to come up with things to do.  For example, if I'm done with a good chunk of time left in class, I'll have the students work on the first homework problem or so and see if they have any questions.  This is a good way to use the last 3 or so minutes in class where students won't start doing their homework on their own.  One other thing that helps me with my pacing that I need to start doing more is using a timer.  I have used one a couple times in the past but always forget to use it more.  I like using it because it sets a deadline for the students when they need to get their activity done.  But then if I didn't give them enough time I can give them more and then adjust that for the next lessons coming up.