Did I mention teaching full-time?

For the last two weeks, I have been the “in charge” teacher in a classroom, and for at least another week longer. Maybe more.

Some days are much easier than others, and I have found it important to change the classroom culture dramatically. The students were accustomed to a fairly open environment, where they could talk and eat as much as they liked. They were not accustomed to turning in work on a daily basis, apparently.

However, I get tired of wiping down desks, watching students race through tasks haphazardly if at all, and waiting for them to finish speaking so I could teach. I got tired of being treated as a baby sitter who could be tricked and ignored. I decided to insist on respect from the students, and to respect them enough to tell them the truth…

So this last week I laid down the law. I explained that they are behind other students in their grade, that it is because they are not actively participating in their own learning and that their constant disruptions are holding the entire class back. I told them these dysfunctional habits would stop. They are NOT happy campers! But the room is less chaotic, I believe they are ready to start learning, and I have told them that I am going to start pushing (they learned very slowly this month) a lot harder than I did the last couple of weeks.

I have great support from the principals, and from the specialist at the ESD (Educational Service District). I am generating my own “quizlets” at the end of every lesson and now have some data from which to draw conclusions as to student engagement, understanding and motivation. Though I am going to push on to the next lesson before they have mastered the last one (for so many reasons, one of which is that the kids are just tired of this section and ready to move on – they won’t learn any more if I stay here right now) I have time scheduled next week for review before I test the chapter. We’ll see how it goes.

Meantime, I am figuring out a few things I can slip in to the next couple of lessons before we get to reviewing and such, and finding some short videos (royalty free for teachers from WGBH) that may help. I am thinking about how to make a magnetic board of some kind so kids can manipulate numbers and operands and such without having to erase and re-write. I would like them to have a way to use their bodies to learn how variables replace numbers to support their writing. At the moment the idea that any symbol can replace any number is not clear to some. It will be a necessary skill for the next several years of math!

I am struggling a bit with figuring how to communicate well with a few students. Some of them I had trouble with at first, but we understand each other now. A few are “hot or cold” students and some days I feel I reach them and others I might as well be speaking a foreign language. Funny story about that, a kid blurted out the other day, “No hablo ingles!” So I calmly replied, “Hablo espanol… que prefieres?” (sorry I don’t have time for diacriticals today). He looked REALLY confused and admitted he was trying to fool me and doesn’t really speak Spanish. Joke on him, I guess. Other students have the common ailments of today that add up to difficulty with impulse control and concentration. I am working on how to adapt my delivery and pacing for them.

And here, finally, a few pics of the classroom. If it’s colorful, it is new since I arrived: Kids’ names on sticky notes around the room, a vocabulary corner, a daily work points chart. I give the kids a daily agenda, an entry task (now using the projector to put it up), the learning target for the day… things like that. I keep the boards as clean as possible, wiping them down periodically throughout the day and completely at night. The room has only one small window, so the cleaner and brighter the rest of the space, the better! Putting the pics in a gallery without comments, but this is the room as it was on January 24 and 25.

I have only four working computers for students and one needs flash installed but I need an administrator password… I prefer the kids to NOT use the computers anyway because they do not use them skillfully for learning yet and I haven’t figured out how to effectively teach them to use the computers when I have only one for every five or six kids. So I have the computer monitors under a tablecloth for most of the day, and the boxes turned off unless I have kids actually using them. It’s a difficult thing to convince kids to NOT rush through their work in order to be the first to get on the computers… but I think I now have them understanding that they are in the classroom to learn math and that the computers will be used only when I allow. Which will mean that when I allow it, the kids should be very respectful of the privilege!

I am constantly thinking of what to add, delete, alter and shift.

It’s a challenge, and I am exhausted most nights, but I also wake up early every day ready to go.

I don’t know if I will want to teach math officially later on, but I think maybe my wonderful Nana is smiling somewhere. She was a middle school math teacher, and I have one of her old plastic tangrams games in my kit, just in case a kid needs it! Most of the time, I love what I am doing, and some of the kids are starting to say that they understand things better than they did. And that is the most important thing.