First Week

Is the first week over already?

I felt like I stepped right back where I left off at the end of last semester’s observation at School Without Walls. The whole experience has been and hopefully will continue to be much less stressful than dropping into a brand new school. I have a reasonable knowledge of the students and my SBE Larry Federman, and this will be a great way to build on the observation experience.

The schedule is the same as during the observation – 1 hour geometry classes at 9:15am and 1::00pm on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; the TechKnow extended class 4 days a week totaling 6.5 hours; the robotics class meeting from 2-2:30 in school, followed by a trip to Bausch & Lomb for a 3 hour session beginning at 3pm on Mondays and Wednesdays. The full SWW staff meets on Thursdays from 10:30am – 12:30pm. I plan to observe in the classrooms of the 2 other math teachers as time allows during the next 6 weeks.

My first day was a Tuesday, and the only class is a two hour session of the TechKnow class. The students are running a “class snack shop” to raise money for class activities, and today’s lesson was an interdisciplinary exercise in determining pricing for the newly acquired inventory. The class includes students from freshman through seniors, and there is a wide range of mathematical ability present.

As part of this class, I assigned a “bonus” assignment related to forms and sources of energy. This requires a little review. Last semester I taught a short unit based on material from New York State Energy Smart Students. I attended a seminar in February 2006 sponsored by this organization, which is part of the national organization NEED.ORG – National Energy Education Development, and received a bunch of free curriculum materials and educational kits.

The reason I had the opportunity to teach this unit was that Larry was called to jury duty, and asked if I would like to teach for that week. I pulled some additional material together, but primarily leaned on the pre-made curriculum, which included a significant amount of group and individual work. This would have been more effective if I had had a rubric of expectations ready to go at the beginning of the class. I think many students were taking it as a week off with Larry out. The bottom line is that the level of response for the required materials, as defined by a portfolio list, was quite low. Larry asked me to put together an additional assignment for the class to cover the material from last semester. As I no longer had the borrowed NEED.ORG materials, I created a Webquest type assignment, with parts 1 and 2 due at the end of the week, and parts 3 and 4 due later.

Larry and I then spent some time discussing where I could best fit into the geometry curriculum, and since there are no classes next week for all the students, that eliminates an additional week from my options. Larry suggested that I prepare for and teach a full unit on probability, which will really be fun since it allows the opportunity for many types of lessons, including manipulatives, games, and so on.

More on the rest of the first week soon.....