Monday, September 7, 2009

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!