Week 1 - Flashback

My first impression of the school was that it was a very welcoming environment and the staff members were quite friendly. On my second day at the school I attended a faculty meeting and was introduced to the staff as a whole. I was not in this school last semester, but I am at the high school that I graduated from and I am working with one of my former teachers, so it is interesting to go through this experience from a teacher’s perspective instead of a student’s perspective. I thought it would be more awkward since I am a former student there and many of the teachers I had in high school are still there, but the staff have been treating me as a peer rather than a student so that has been reassuring. For the most part, the students seem to have a good work ethic, stay on task, and pay attention in class, but that is probably because most of the students I am working with are upperclassmen in AP or Pre-AP classes. I’ve been trying to be involved this first week as much as possible (taking attendance, grading papers, entering grades, answering questions, joining the Google classroom…). The students are hesitant to ask me questions about math, so I either have to step in or my cooperating teacher redirects students to ask me questions instead of him. They do tend to ask me random questions though, usually about what college is like. I’ve also been observing two other teachers who teach mainly freshmen and sophomores, and it is interesting to see the difference in classroom management for those teachers compared to my cooperating teacher.

Something I would like to accomplish this semester is encouraging students to think more deeply about mathematics. When I hear some students asking their peers for help on homework, they accept the help without asking for an explanation of why something is true, and I feel the need to step in and explain/clarify misconceptions. I think that by helping students question why something is true and explain their thinking processes to their peers, they will have a deeper understanding of the mathematics they are doing. I also want to help students get more excited about learning math, because it makes me really sad I hear the lowerclassmen complain about how much they hate math.

While my cooperating teacher was lecturing, I was able to see how the directed questions he asked the students let them toward discovering new ideas in class. I could tell quite a bit about students’ thinking processes based on how they answered the questions and how he worded and reworded the questions to guide them. He also holds high expectations for all his students, and they know that based on how he interacts with him in class, so I’m working on communicating to discouraged students that they can succeed in math and I believe in them.
I’ve only been to two full days of class this week, because Tuesday I was only there for planning periods, Thursday the students got out of afternoon classes to watch a basketball tournament, and today there was a fire drill, so I haven’t gotten to interact with the students a whole lot so far. My goal for next week is to learn all my students’ names and learn something about them so that I can call them by their names in class. When I went to the faculty meeting, the principal talked about the importance of getting to know our students so that they know we care about them and their education, so I want the students to know that I’m there to guide them and help them learn instead of just to help them memorize enough facts/algorithms to pass a test. Also, if I know my students better, I can use that to help plan my instruction so that the students’ learning needs are met.