My Eigth Day

Today was a little crazy, but I handled. I moved students into a new seating chart. I think I am done moving people and I have to enforce them not talking. I swear no matter who she sits next to she is talking. I will have to be on her. Some students said they couldn't sit in back because they can't see. I sort of just suspected that they didn't want to sit where I put them, but I honored that to move them on the other side of the classroom. Since I spent time moving them I had to cut a lot of the book work. I went too fast during the example problem. A lot of the students seemed to be engaged, but I have to stop and get everyone. We just barely finished the problem. I should have just done that problem with the class. I could have slowed down and asked more questions if that was the only thing we were doing. I sped through the problem cause I wanted to get through it because they will be doing a similar problem tomorrow. I worry if they will be able to do the problem tomorrow. Since I was speeding through the problem I was talking and writing too much. I didn't have my eyes on the class enough. I should have got up and walked around more. Also my notes for this problem weren't that organized. I think I need to do everything on lined paper to keep everything neat. I know this will be a continuing struggle to make my hand writing neat. However right now in my practicum I am doing most of my work on blank paper which does not help my writing. I need to be organized with my instruction, so that the students can be more organized. However I am not supposed to be completely organized since I am just starting out. So I am going with the flow as much as possible.

The good outcomes of today is that I think I have got a lot of my students writing more stuff down. I think they are learning how to take notes. I had students who are normally disengaged writing everything down and asking questions about stuff. So the behavior of writing notes is good, but we will see how much they retain.

Tomorrow I will have to check with all the students as they do their work. I will try to direct them to their notes when they get to the similar problem. All tomorrow will be review and modeling. Then they will work on a worksheet. I will make sure they take notes at the beginning of class. Then direct them to those notes first when they begin to ask questions. I know who is not getting it and I will do my best to check in with those students and make sure they got it.

Since I am being observed tomorrow I was supposed to meet with my adviser at the end of this day. However we went into Lockdown level 1 for about the last ten minutes of class. The cops were dealing with some incident in the neighborhood south of the school. They called and said we should go on lockdown. We closed the door, kept all the students in the classroom, and closed the shades. Since we were on lockdown my adviser couldn't meet with me in person and I talked to with him about my lesson on the phone later. But the timing was just crazy. I have been here observing for a month and teaching for almost a month while I was here I have been a part of a fire drill and a lockdown.

So hopefully all goes well tomorrow because my adviser is coming to observe me. It should be an interesting and high energy.