Day in the Life –
August 26, 2016
6:15am: Wake up and finally get out of bed – it’s
Friday, so definitely an extra challenge today!
It’s August in Atlanta, which means don’t bother straightening the hair,
and opt for the extra few minutes of extra sleep.
6:50am: Pack up lunch for today and eat breakfast. Every Sunday, I make a monstrous omelette and
break it up for breakfast each day of the week. I also pack up my lunches for the week. This is like Meg Craig does with outfits,
only this would be more of a morning struggle for me if not made ahead of time.
7:15am: Arrive to school and realize I need to
rearrange student desks because Algebra 1 has their first Unit test today. Begin doing that and work on what I call my “file
pile”, which goes into my course binders.
Organization of paper has always been a struggle for me, but my last
school whipped me into shape with that.
Now I can’t go more than a couple of days without dealing with
piles. I spent too many years trying to
clean up those messes at the end of a semester with an enormous trash bin.
7:45am: Meeting with my department chair and a member
of my Algebra 1 team who started to become a rogue operator. All of
us on the Algebra 1 team are coming in from different schools, so it has been
hard to get into a rhythm on the team. He and I actually talked about it at lunch
yesterday, but this formality meeting was set yesterday. Another meeting…. Out of 5 mornings before school and 5
lunches this week, 7 of those time periods have been at one meeting or another. Thankfully, I have 1st period
planning, which helps to then get ready for the day if I still need to.
8:40am: Meeting lasted almost an hour; ran over
because my department chair and I both have 1st period planning. Good conversations were had, and I feel like
we are back to a starting place in our PLC, but start-overs can be a good thing
if everyone is committed to a definable better.
I could have sat and talked to my department chair much longer, but I
realized that I needed to go and copy my tests for today. Because I finalized them and sent the key out
to everyone, there are no edits to worry about, but they do need to be copied!
9:00am: Begin finalizing my instruction and notes for
3rd and 4th period Accel Algebra for today on Dimensional
Analysis. Not a welcomed topic by
students, I want to make sure it has the proper hooks and want to find spots in
the problems for good conversations and “What –if “ scenarios. Yesterday during the unit rates lesson, we
ended up with an amazing discussion on the business principal of profit and not
being able to keep everything you may earn.
Further, we visited the fact that there is not guarantee of profit.
9:30am: 2nd Period Algebra 1 and time for
their first Unit test of the year. We
have been doing some exciting activities in class the past couple of days to
review order of operations, number types, writing algebraic expressions, and “terms,
factors, coefficients, constants”, so I am looking forward to how they do. Most finished in plenty of time and said they
felt prepared, so I am hoping they knocked their first assessment out of the
park! During the test I grade their
review homework and start writing lesson plans for next week as well as attend
to the constant stream of email coming in.
12:45pm The meeting was in my room and about whether
or not to replace a lowest quiz with next week’s test if they do better. This is not a practice I use, but I agree to
it to save argument and time. As my
Accel Algebra colleague is leaving, my mentor stops by and is trying to
convince me to “eat lunch like a real person” in the office with others today. I am panicking a bit now because I have no
materials for math support 6th period today. I had planned on puzzles, but I had also
planned on my entire lunch period to print and copy an assortment. I told my mentor I would try to get in
there. Next, my Algebra 1 colleague
stops by to see what to do about giving the test 6th period because
our principal is making the formal announcement of the death of one of our
students this week; we both know that students may need to opt out of the
test. We come up with plan B for giving
the test Monday for his class if needed.
As soon as that was done, one of my colleagues from my former school
stops by to say hi and visit since he is subbing for us today. He has gone out of the classroom to pursue a
graduate degree in statistics. He was an
amazing teacher, and something tells me he will go back someday (I hope so). I really miss working with him.
1:05pm: I now have 15 minutes left to eat lunch and
make copies. I quickly decide to do
Ken-Ken only with support today (they had their 1st major exam today
in their core class, so I wanted to do something more relaxing with numbers
today). I print the puzzles, go to the
math office with my yogurt and join the others while my copies were
running. It was nice to get some laughs
in before the afternoon classes. I have
to push myself to do this more often.
1:30 – 3:30pm: 5th and 6th period came
and passed. It was hard to get support
engaged into the puzzles, especially after the announcement from the principal,
but they were good sports about it considering it was a Friday, unfortunate
news, and we were all exhausted. I was
relieved when the bell rang at 3:30pm and excited to start my weekend. I stayed a bit after school to talk with my
team teacher and a couple of other colleagues about overloaded classes, lack of
access to our gradebooks yet, and the fact that my support class will dissipate
soon (more on that with a formal blog).
4:20pm: I hit the road to meet up with my colleagues
from my former school at Taco Mac for dinner and drinks. I left too late of course and met up with
some awesome and ridiculous suburb traffic...
Not really what one wants to deal with after a long day of work - this went on for 4-5 miles. Gotta love North Fulton County, GA.
and was late, but when I got to the
restaurant, there was a nice surprise.
Two other of my close colleagues from another nearby high school that I
tutor for were there too. We all sat
together and caught up on our school year so far – all the crazy glitches, the
stress, the awesome kids, etc. What I
love about this scene was the fact that were had 3 different schools worth of
things to share. It has taken some time,
but with the many high schools in our area, we are becoming a pretty close knit
set of mathies. We don’t get our together
often, but we do all know each other and have been around long enough to form
these bonds. It is great being in the
company of those who share your path – we shared a lot of laughter too. I love being a part of this community even if
we are all at different schools.
7:30pm: I arrive home after dinner and re-cap the day
with my husband who is going into teaching as a second career; I am now
re-capping my day for this blog. I was
doing the blog in real time until I finished the 10:30 am segment; then the day
got away from me. We are now three weeks
done in our school year already, but this 3rd Friday feels the most
exhausting, so I am glad I am at home.
My plan is to go to bed by 10pm and get a good night’s sleep. I do not have much planned for this weekend,
so hopefully I can get good and recharged for next week, which is a short one
with the kiddos. Our school has an extra
professional day next Friday, but I did not know this coming into the
school. I will not share that learning
day with my colleagues as we are going out of town for our annual anniversary
trip and already financially committed.
I am so very much looking forward to it though, and I know it will help
next week to have that pot of gold at the end of the week; then of course is
the 3 day Labor Day weekend!!!
Until next timeJ
Reflection
Questions
1) Teacher make a lot of decisions throughout the day. Sometimes we make so many it feels
overwhelming. When you think about
today, what is a decision/teacher mover you made that you are proud of? What is one you are worried about?
Today I am glad that I made the decision
to give support math a break from the
math after their
first unit test in their core math class. As I stated in the blog, it was hard to get them
engaged, but
I think it was important for them to know that I
do understand the need for a break from normal
routine after
working hard towards a big assessment.
I am concerned about the decision to not
fight harder to not replace the lowest quiz in the unit
with the test score if it is higher, but I am
going to trust my colleague on this one.
For me, I think
it sends the wrong message early and in the wrong
way. I am very much a proponent of
finding
ways to reward hard work and mastery when it was
not there before, but I o not like doing it on
the grand scale.
I like it much better by individual, and I think it allows for trust
building and
individual communication
between students and teachers. Still, teaching
in our area is very
PLC-based and too many times in a robotic sense, so I know
if we are going to do this, my
colleague is right about the process.
2) Every person’s
life is full of highs and lows. Share
with us some of what that is like as a teacher. What
are you looking forward to? What
has been a challenge for you lately?
This year, I have been doing a lot more
interactive activities with students; many of them
open ended and task-orientated. I have truly enjoyed this and look forward to
continuing
this process because I believe it has helped immensely with
success in their first assessments.
The most challenging thing for me this
year is my support class as it is structured differently
than my support classes in the past. I was used to having a support class for 2
hours in which
I was the students’ core content and support
teacher. Wow did we get so much done and
build a
community! This
year, support is the last period of the day, and my students are coming from 4
other different content teachers. It is so hard to build any kind of
relationship with them or get
to any kind of consistent routine. I find myself more and more frustrated by the
day.
3) We are reminded
constantly of how relational teaching is.
As teachers we work to build relationships with teachers and students. Describe a relational moment you had with
someone lately.
As mentioned in the blog, I had a member
of the Algebra 1 team become a rogue operator within
the last
2 weeks. Both of us sought help from
our department chair, and we planned to meet
today. My colleague came to my room during lunch
yesterday to talk, and we had a great
conversation about what had happened and what we could do to
fix it moving forward. This made
the
meeting with our department chair much more rich this
morning. We were able to have a
sharing
session rather than a “fix-it” session.
I am proud of us for committing to talk sooner that
required as well as
the conversations
we had.
4) Teachers are
always working on improving, and are often have specific goals for things to
work on
Throughout the year. What have you been doing to work on your
goal? How are you doing?
One goal for this year was to create more
engaging activities for students. So far
I have been
doing pretty good at implementing at least a
couple of engaging activities per class per week.
I am able to keep
up with this because I followed Sarah Carter’s idea of posting a tweet for
teach180 as often as possible.
Another goal I wanted for this year was to
spiral concepts into homework assignments to help
keep information alive whether a student is
working on mastery or maintaining mastery.
So far
this has been a challenge because of time, but I
have been able to do this with a few assignments.
My hope is that as the beginning of the year gets
less crazy, time will allow for this.
5) What else happened this month that you want
to share?e
My most exciting thing that happened this
month was when I introduced MTBoS and Desmos to
my
colleagues at my former high school. The
reception I got was incredible, and I was so
excited to pass along these great resources that I
have learned and re-energized from!!!
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