Week 3 at Willink

A little more on what was a very educational first full week of teaching. It's a very odd feeling teaching the same material multiple times, and on different days due to the block schedule. Andy has been very helpful as far as pushing me to immediately reflect on what went well and also not so well immediately after each class. I've been able to make adjustments and improvements after each block, and his experience is extremely valuable.

There are four regular Math 7 blocks, and we are moving through a unit focused on the Pythagorean theorem. All of the classes have their own personality and student culture. It's great that they are all less than 20 students - it really helps me in trying to make individual connections with each student. That isn't yet the case in the BIG Math 7 accelerated class, with 36 students. For whatever reason, the jump from 20 to 36 feels larger than 80% (i.e. (36-20)/20 x 100) - however, they are all very bright, focused and easy to work with.

So bright, in fact, that my first accelerated block on Tuesday had only enough material for about 50 minutes. Andy helped me out with some additional material focused on slopes, and it worked out OK. The following day, he really pushed me to do more planning during our planning time, and I'm so glad he did. We had a short but extremely valuable and focused conversation on the accelerated unit, which is about linear systems. I was floundering a little, and that conversation and 2 hours of work really helped it all to make sense and allow me to see the big picture.

The end result was that I over-corrected a bit, and had TOO MUCH stuff for the next accelerated lesson on Thursday. I then tried to go with the planned worksheet which I hadn't quite prepared them for yet. My key learning from those two lessons? - be very cognizant of sequencing, and making sure each detail is taught before you ask the students for performance. It's very easy to leave out a detail here and there that seems obvious to us, but can create a gap in a student's understanding.