Reflections on teaching

This blog was started as a way for me to reflect on my teaching, which was mainly statistics at the time. However, I've taught stat for 10 years and this year my new AVID prep takes way more time than I ever guessed. I'm wondering if I should do a new blog for my AVID ideas or not.

This week is kind of easy on me AVID wise. We have tutorials on Tues and Thurs, so I will call each kid up individually to my desk to discuss their grades and have them start a weekly chart of their grades. Friday, we have a guest speaker from the Cyber Crimes division to talk about internet safety, police work, etc. I'm excited about it, although I will lose my planning period.

The lone day that I am teaching this week for AVID is Wednesday. We will be reading the article "Life Coach" from the Reader's Digest about a football coach that tries to instill good life lessons in his players. The kiddos will take notes, write a summary, write 3 questions, and find their 4 weekly vocab words from the article. The reason for this is because I've noticed that they aren't doing a very good job of using their vocab in a sentence, so I think I need to clarify the expectations further. After we read the article, we will discuss our tutorials and how they are going, how to decide which question to ask, how to ask good questions (especially in math! they want to write Level 1 questions), and how to write a good summary of the tutorial.

I think this will definitely become more of a reflective place for me than I've used it for in the past year or so... teaching AVID is a lot of fun, but it's definitely outside of my comfort zone, so I need a place to reflect, vent, write, etc.

In the words of one of our quotes from last week... Failure teachs success!

Post with no name...

I don't know what to call it... it's partly a vent, partly a "yay kids"..

With AVID, I've tried very hard to do things right - to be a cop and a cheerleader at the same time, to find interesting ideas for lessons, to get them to work hard and do well in their classes and it's flat out exhausting!!

The kids have been together now for a year, with another teacher, so they know each other and very comfortable with each other (read: chatty). The lack of focus at the beginning of the hour was driving me insane, so I started this week giving them quotes to write down and write how it applies to their life. Great idea, but I don't know how to make it work as well in class as it does in my head. I don't know how to get the kids away from restating the quote and into its deeper meaning and how it applies to their life.

Also, I started doing vocab - trying to get them to increase their vocabulary. They have to write the definition, the synonyms, use it in a sentence, and make some mental connections with a diagram or word association. Again, it worked great in my head, but most are not taking it nearly as seriously as I want them to. The ultimate goal is so they don't end up where I was in college - not having a very good vocabulary and feeling stupid more times than not.

One last frustration is how to teach them to write good summaries. I want them to summarize something without it being "today we did" or "this is notes we took over"... but I don't know how to *teach* that skill :( My math teacher training is not helping me much with this class and that's a HUGE frustration.

On the positive side, they wrote GREAT notes to their teachers this week, did a great job of writing good quality questions, and overall worked pretty hard for me.

*sigh* I hope I get the hang of this someday...

Treading Water

We've now completed two weeks of school (7 days with kids) and this week, uni is set to start. I am barely making it... Last night, while running some errands, hubby turned to me and said "Hun, I'm really worried about you - you can't keep this pace all year". My response: "I know - I'm worried too"

What's different about this year? Two new preps is a lot of it. Also, my 3rd prep (AP), which I've taught for 10 years, is always an ongoing project to me. I refine and revise every year. The hardest part for me this year is that I feel like I'm doing a very poor job on the new preps. I don't like doing a bad job at anything I do, so doing 2 bad jobs is about to kill me.

So, keep me in your thoughts - if you don't see me surface for a while, send the Coast Guard... my legs may get very tired of treading water :)

It has been too many days since my last confession

I have been feeling guilty about not updating my blog, but was able to put it off - that is, until I read f(t) yesterday and found myself totally agreeing with her.

As a kid, I never kept a diary (I tried many times though!). In fact, I still have the first (and only) diary that I got when I was 7... it's only about a 1/3 filled and that includes through age 20! I didn't really expect much out of a blog either, nor did I ever expect to have readers or commenters. However, what I've found in the blogosphere is that this is an amazing place for reflection, collaboration, and the occasional vent.

By looking at my blogroll at the right, you can see that I follow mainly math teachers, with an occasional elementary teacher (love Mrs. Mimi!) or other subject matter teacher thrown in for their quirky sense of humor, writing style, etc. I enjoy reading the ups and downs of other classroom teachers, LOVE the WCYDWT feature on dy/dan, getting to peek anonymously into other classrooms :)

This summer I have also discovered Twitter, another tool that has been amazing for online collaboration. I follow a lot of the same people that I follow in blogs, but the feedback is what truly makes Twitter a useful tool. By posting a comment or question in 140 characters or less, you can open the lines of communication with other teachers and get almost instant responses about their policies, procedures, lesson ideas, etc. I don't think I would use Twitter much for my personal life, it has great applications professionally.

For me, this blog fills a huge gap in my teaching career. By forcing myself to descibe a situation clearly so that the reader can understand, I end up with a clearer understanding myself. This reflective nature of the blog is one of its greatest attributes.

Happy blogging!

Online book study?

I've had a "d'oh" moment...

Let me preface this post with a bit of background...

I am an avid reader of fiction and comprehend fiction quite well, but struggle a lot with comprehension of difficult texts. I've known this for quite a while... in high school, I was in the single digit page numbers of Beowulf until the day we tested on it.. and in college, I was *so* eternally grateful for Monarch notes because they paraphrased the text into contempory language.

Last week, at our AVID summer institute, one of our assignments was to read an article about college readiness vs college preparedness. After struggling quite a while to read the edu-speak, the article became crystal clear during our group discussion of the material. This cycle repeated itself later on in the week when I had to read an editoral about 9/11 and we discussed it in a Socratic Seminar. These two examples really illustrated the power of discussion for deeper understanding.

Fast forward to this week... I was reading on AtoZTeacherForums and read a great post on "must-reads" for teachers. I started looking at my own professional library, and realized that I have many of the must-haves, but I haven't read them all and the few I have read were a while back. Coupled with my "a-ha" moment of last week, I decided to search out an online book study group, only to find that they really don't exist :(

So... the question at hand is...
1) Do you know of somewhere I should look? OR
2) Would any of you be interested in doing a book study?

Have a happy 4th!

Braindump of ideas...

I just needed to get these out on "paper" in order to process them... and to make sure I don't forget them!! :)

* I really do like the idea of a wiki or blog for the kids to post daily or weekly or chapter summaries... Not sure how to implement this though, nor how to grade it. I don't want to change around my entire class website either, so I need to figure out how to implement it within that structure... Some grading ideas can be found here

* Another teacher I know has the kids create a study guide throughout the year with the thought of the AP exam in May. She has them take their chapter examples and a summary sheet of each chpater and compile them into a notebook. I like this idea - to build a study guide throughout the year. However I'm wondering what else should be included. Should it have some basic notes/instructions?? Some questions from the textbook? Vocab? If so, would this all be bundled as a "packet" handed out at the beginning of the chapter? Would kids regard this as busy work?

* Just ran across another interesting idea regarding partner quizzes. If the kids have their homework completed on time, they can earn the priviledge of taking a partner quiz. Of course, homework isn't required in my class, but I still thought it was an interesting idea to have the kids earn it.

* Second semester this year, I let the kids do test corrections for 1 week after the test was graded. They had to earn the opportunity by showing evidence of having done the homework or review. They had to explain why they messed up and then rework the problem correctly. I really liked this and plan to continue it. It had built-in remediation because the kids had to do their homework (if they hadn't already), plus they had to self-assess their errors.

* Speaking of HW, I was nervous about not requiring HW at the beginning. However, most kids really matured over the year! I still had some kids that wouldn't do it and their grades were low (I've never had this rate of D/F grades), BUT, I also had kids that went from minimial homework and C grades to almost every problem and high Bs because they had more control of their grade. By doing the homework, they did better on the quizzes (since the quizzes were from the HW). Overall, I think by giving the kids more control, they benefited more than if I had required it. While I hate that I had kids that did poorly and never learned that lesson, I would rather them learn it in HS than when it costs them a lot of money in college.

* I plan to give up more control this year and be more of a faciliator than a lecturer. I tried this 2nd semester and started most topics out with an activity that walked the kids through the gist of the topic. They had to read, discuss, write, and be more active in their learning overall. One kid summed it up when he said "I like doing the activities first before you teach the material - it gives my brain something to attach the lecture to!" Wow - what a profound statment! Making connections really helps material stick in their heads rather than just "renting" the material til the quiz/test.

* This year I had study groups for the kids to work with. This year, I think I want to modify that, either by assigning them to new seating charts (and new partners/triplets) every 9 weeks or something. The groups did not work out how I wanted them to. I had hoped they would get together outside of class, and some did in partners, but not as a group overall.

* Back to the online issue... I would really like to incorporate more online learning. I did online review quizzes on a weekly basis and I did like that more than doing them in-class. With the online feature, they could call up their buddy, talk through a problem, use their book/notes and the instant feedback was great for the kids. Some kids really preferred to do them in class, but I hated the time constraint that imposed and online gave them the freedom to really understand what hte question was asking and reach out for help. I would like to increase the online component using webquests, stat software, etc.

* Just found this website... Interesting review games, PPT timers... check it out :) http://people.uncw.edu/ertzbergerj/ppt_games.html

I'm sure I'll add more later...

Class Blogs and Other stuff

Yesterday was my official last day of school - woot! After an uneventful Friday (which was wonderful after Thursday's fiasco!), I spent the weekend cleaning the backyard, going to a retirement party, etc. Yesterday I was pretty sore from the yard work, so packing up my room was a SLOW process :)

I leave for the reading on Thursday, so today I ran errands... bought a new suitcase, a few new clothes, and assorted other random items. Speaking of random... does anyone know where to buy "Key Lime Pie Mints" - they are the green and white swirled mints. I love those and wanted to have some in my purse for the trip.

While catching up on my blog reader this evening, I ran across this comment:

"I taught English, so we’re talking two different beasts here, but something I tried that went over with moderate success was having kids post class notes to our class wiki on a weekly, not daily, basis. Each semester I’d ask the kids to pair up and I’d assign each pair a week of the semester – you’re Sept 9, you’re Sept 16, etc. – for which they were responsible for keeping detailed records of class discussion, lecture, activities, etc. By the following Tuesday, they had to post the class notes to the course wiki."

Does anyone else do this? I'm loving the idea of having a pair of kids post a weekly summary for the class! Any ideas on format, how to grade, etc?