My thoughts for the week of 3/8 - 3/11 (Week 10)

This past week was truly a week of positives for me.  The past couple weeks I feel like my classroom management was slipping.  I took it upon myself to try to be more stern, in fact I used the school's "step" system this week like I've never used it before.  I handed out close to 15 steps to students this week for shouting out.  I know I like a very interactive classroom, but I felt that the students were getting away from me.  After talking with my cooperating teacher and other teachers on the team I found that I have not been slipping on my classroom management, but was reassured that it is just this years make-up of students.  I plan to continue to hit the students hard with their "step" program.  I feel like a handful of students just don't really care.

Another positive for me this week was getting deeply involved with one of the school's psychologists who has been working closely with one of the students I have everyday.  He has made a plan that has been in place over the last few weeks to try to better this students behavior.  This student is known for blatant shout-outs, rudeness with teachers, saying sexually harassing comments, saying racist comments, and overall just struggles with bad behavior.  Over the past few weeks he has to come to every teacher at the end of the class and they fill out a four question survey about the student's behavior by answering yes or no (yes's being good).  Although he is getting many yes's I still felt like his behavior in my class was not improving.  Later to find out that other teachers agreed that he was not improving.  For some reason he was still getting a majority of yes's on his sheet and his father was rewarding him for all his yes's.  At one of the team meetings where the psychologist was at with our team, I brought up the very fact that this student's sheet needs to be changed.  One question the sheet asked was if he used any racial/anti-semetical comments.  Since this doesn't occur everyday or maybe he has improved in this category it was getting yes's.  And since they pulled him from language and have him working like a study hall with the school psychologist for a period he was getting his homework done and coming to class, which gave him another yes.  Since there were only four questions he was getting an astounding 50% of his points right off the bat every day.  Getting 50% of his points and being rewarded still wasn't changing his shout-out problems or his problem of staying on-task in class.  I fought hard with the psychologist to get his sheet changed so that he has to work harder to be rewarded.  To my surprise, the other teachers all agreed.  The psychologist, not so much, but since all of us teachers were pushing for it now, he had to change the sheet.  Next week will start a new behavior sheet so we will see how it goes.  This kid is very bright and finds ways to get around anything he can.  For instance, if the sheet said, 'does not shout out in class', he may try not to, but instead would be using non-verbal motions and expressions to get the students to notice him and get them off-track.  I know I get the raw end of the deal, because I have him 7th period, which is his last period of the day before he goes to his study hall with the psychologist.  He is smart enough to know if he is good enough during the day that he can loose points with me and still have enough points to be rewarded by his father!  Any way, I feel like I've been empowered through this situation and respected by the other teachers for standing up to the school psychologist and trying to get something done to benefit not only our classrooms, but more importantly this student.  This student scares me a bit.  He wrote an essay about what he wants to be in life and the paper was about wanting to be a terrorist.  I don't know if the kid is just screaming for attention in any way possible or what?

Besides these issues I felt like the classroom was positively a week of growth for the students.  With the regular classes we went over bar graphs, histograms, frequency tables, and line graphs on Tuesday and Wednesday.  The students proved to be that although they are not artists they definitely understood the concepts of graphing.  On Thursday we had fun as a group discussing how graphs and statistics can be misleading and talked about seeing misleading graphs and statistics through advertisement all around us.  Then on Friday, I had them do a fun review activity with dice.  They had to roll two dice to get the sum thirty times. Then find the mean, median, mode, and range.  Then make a frequency table of their findings.  Finally, they got to choose two graphs to make to display their data: stem-and-leaf plot, box-and-whisker plot, bar graph, or histogram.  With honors we worked for a few days on how to solve for the x-value, vertex, points on the parabola, and reflection points with functions that are in the quadratic form.  Finally they had to graph them and shade them if they were inequalities.  The students really struggled with this concept so I had to extend an extra day of practice for them on the subject.  I am confident that the majority really grasped this concept by the end, which was rewarding, because after Tuesday and Wednesday I was a bit nervous that they would never understand it.  But they got it!  On Friday we moved on to solving and estimating square roots so that on Monday I can move to solving quadratic functions by using square roots.  Next week, will be interesting I know a lot of students are leaving early for spring break and we have tests for the regulars and honors next Thursday and Friday.  Students will be taking them early if they are leaving early.

An effective teacher understands and uses a variety of instructional techniques that encourage students to develop critical thinking and problem solving.  I am a teacher who often uses word problems, which both make the students use their critical thinking and problem solving skills.  I try to throw a word problem in most of my lessons and in the students homework if at all possible.  Life to me is about thinking critically and solving problems, so these students should be practicing and perfecting these skills.  In this placement, it can be frustrating because to my knowledge the sixth grade math teachers do not require them to do word problems, they just tell them to try them.  This is so sad in my opinion, the word problems are the most applicable to life.  In real life someone is not going to ask what's 10 x 12.  When your carpeting your floor and your room is ten feet by 12 feet you need to buy carpet that is 10 x 12 or 120 square feet.  Just this week alone in my class with, I had the students reading word problem type information and they had to pick out the important information and graph what was necessary.  This uses their critical thinking and problem solving skills.  Then they needed to be able to read the graphs and decode what they meant.  As I have said in the past, I am lucky to have a para-professional in my room with all my LD and BD students.  There isn't that many, but she makes sure she is floating in the room to help them out.  Many of them seem to pick up the concepts they just want reassurance as they start to work on their own.  I try to do multiple examples to give them different situations.  She also gets to have them for one period a day to re-hit anything they struggle with.  Math is one they do often, since it is a testable subject and usually a problem area for LD and BD students.

I feared my Thursday lesson the most with my regular students, which was about misleading graphs and statistics.  It ended up being one of my favorites.  The students seemed to really respond and like it.  What I did was just put up on the ELMO multiple examples of misleading graphs and statistics.  As a class we would silently look at the graph or statistic then talk about how we thought they were misleading.  I was pleasantly surprised by many of their answers.  They thought of truthful things that I didn't even think about.  As a class they were on their own to right some examples of what could be misleading about graphs in their notes.  At the end they came up with on their own, that statistics need to be read word for word, considering each word to find where companies try to mislead the general public.  I was very pleased, for the most part, how well they acted and more importantly how they responded.  They loved to be "detectives" and find where we were being misled.  This made them use critical thinking the entire lesson.  Some finds were bigger and more important, while others were interesting and thought provoking.  When someone commented on something unimportant I would guide the students back into their thoughts by saying something like, "hmmm...that's interesting I didn't think about that, very nice observation, but is there anything bigger in this graph (statement) that is trying to mislead us in some way?"  This seemed to work well with the students.

With the honors students this week they struggled a lot with the concepts of pulling apart quadratic functions to find useful information to graph it.  I thought this lesson would be a breeze for them, but it wasn't.  It required a lot of patience not only from me to deal with their struggling, but patience from the students to stick with it until they understood it.  I tried with all my might on Wednesday to go over multiple examples.  I repeated myself over and over with both the same wording and different wording to get the students on board.  By the end of Wednesday, I think 75% of the students got it, which was much better than Tuesday were I think 75% were confused.  I wanted to give them all a chance to practice and to try to catch the other 25% so on Thursday instead of moving on, I spent the entire period going over the homework problems and then going over some more examples of the same types of problems.  Then gave them another assignment doing the same type of problems that I wrote out by hand.  On Friday, the students showed me that 98% of them totally understood this concept.  I pulled one of the two students aside after class who didn't quite grab it yet and we worked for a few moment together to reinforce him.  I hope it helped.  Instead of using book examples, I went with their homework examples because it meant something to the students to really understand their homework and get it done.  I also had to re-word and repeated often to make them understand.  Then finally throw-out my schedule and use and extra day to go over it again.  This seemed to work with them and I am now confident that they understand it.

My hook and hold methods are becoming repetitive.  I've been looking online for some new ideas.  I love stories, pictures, questioning the students as ways to hook and hold them.  The anticipatory set is huge I'm always open to learning and using new methods.  Looking online at lesson plans often gives some helpful insight for anticipatory sets.

One goal last week was to get ahead on some class stuff.  I did finish a couple of things, but didn't get done as much as I wanted, so hopefully spring break will let me catch up on some things.  My other goal was to work with the para-professional and start coming up with ideas for the chapter four group test for the regular students and to start grouping them together.  We sat down a day this week and grouped the students in groups of threes.  We will have to edit this week as we find out which students are leaving early for spring break.  We also have edited an older version of the group test to better fit our needs and have added a component of rating their group members as well.

For this coming week I would like to set my first goal as getting things together nicely for those students leaving early and to prepare myself as multiple students will be testing multiple days this week in order to include this test in everyone's last grade for the quarter.  My second goal is to make sure I include components of critical thinking and problem solving in every lesson I create for the week.

I look forward to the week ahead...