Week 14- Teaching Practice

Week 14

In the past week, I found my students as hectic as ever, which worried me, but I also had several students who have started to mature and realize that getting good grades is important. This has been a pleasant surprise and so great to see. These students are now taking notes, asking questions, completing their work, and doing well on assignments because of it. The disciplinary issues continue for now, and the past three weeks I have really hit hard on students with phone calls home, referrals, after school detention, and so on. Hopefully, this will lead to a mutual understanding about classroom expectations. I have talked about the expectations multiple times and many students still lack the discipline to follow these simple rules. 

On a more positive note, I FINALLY used my Promethean Smart Board on Friday, and the lesson went so well! My students were comparing linear relationships when they were presented in different forms. For instance, they would get an equation for one situation and a table for another situation and be asked to compare them and answer questions about them. I invited students to come up to the board and write on there. This allowed students to get more involved and I had students engaged who previously would have never gone up to the board all because of the cool technology and the different colors. 

All in all, this week could have been much worse. My fourth period Algebra 1 class did very well Thursday and I rewarded them with Jolly Ranchers. They were all involved, asking good questions and most of them got a 100% on their exit ticket. This class has struggled so it was a bright spot in my week to see them all do so well.