Math was fun today

Yesterday I had a great day. I teach two different classes, I teach math 7 periods 2, 3, 5 and math 7 honors 1, 6, 7.

In math 7 today we played a review game; everyone had fun and there was candy involved. It was a fun day; we listened to Bohemian Rhapsody and taught the students about good music, and reviewed for the quiz tomorrow.

In math 7 honors I taught a lesson on Pascal’s Triangle. I team teach with another teacher first period and today was my day to teach the lesson, but it didn’t go as well as I planed and I was nervous to teach the same lesson two more times. The teacher I team teach with has a more follow the rules exactly way of teaching than I do. She’s a very linear person and does a, then b, then c and doesn’t deviate from it, so her students kind of just sit there quietly during lessons and don’t give you a ton of feedback. I finished the lesson in like 20 minutes and had 20 minutes left of class to entertain them, luckily I roll with the punches and decided I was going to learn everyone’s name by having them go down the row and say their name and I took a page from Dustin’s book and had them say their favorite smell. That got them talking, now they know that I allow talking and will talk with them.

During my prep period I slightly revised how I was going to teach the lesson for 6^th and 7^th period and it went great. I gave the students this handout:

I told them they were supposed to figure out the pattern and fill out only the left triangle with their best guess. I gave them plenty of time to establish their pattern then I called for volunteers to share what their next row looked like and how they got it. I got answers like: 1 5 7 7 5 1,     1 5 9 9 5 1,      1 5 10 10 5 1,     1 5 12 12 5 1. I wrote all their guesses on the board and in every class at least one person guessed the right answer so I told the students the right answer was on the board but before I explained the triangle and told them which was right we were going to learn about it. I then gave them a lesson on the history and a few of the patterns of Pascal's Triangle. During the lesson a few of the students would figure out which guess was right and try to remember how that person figured it out. They loved the patterns and asked me tons of questions and we talked about how weird zero is and all the weird rules with zero. At the end of the lesson I explained how to get the next row and had them fill out the right triangle.

 We had amazing discussions in both 6^th and 7^th period. After the lesson I gave them this worksheet:

I also gave them this completed Pascal Triangle to help them with the worksheet and had them color in a pattern for homework:

When students were leaving I heard them talking to their friends leaving the other math 7 honors class and saying how cool math was today. I love it when students leave class and ask if the other class had as much fun as we did. That’s how you know you’re teaching math right.

I hung the patterns they came up with in the hall.

This is how teaching is supposed to be

Lately I haven’t enjoyed teaching as much as I did at the ranch or teaching snowboarding lessons or even student teaching. This week I found out why.

We told the administration that we had too many kids and that made for too many papers to grade every day, too many formative assessments to keep track of, too many missed quizzes to keep track of, too many IEP’s and 504 (legal things to give accommodations to students) too keep track of, and too many conflicting IEP’s in the same classroom- one kid needs a silent testing area, one needs test read aloud, one needs music playing. I had classes with 40 students in them, if you’ve ever tried to get 40 twelve-year-olds to sit quietly after they’ve been to 6 other classes it’s nearly impossible.  I was recording the scores of 190 papers every day, grading 190 quizzes every Friday, grading 190 formative assessments every Thursday. Let me tell you, we need to bring penmanship back into the schools, parents were getting mad because if we couldn’t read it in about 30 seconds we just marked it wrong. But I did the math one day and actually graded a student’s paper that was extremely hard to read, it took me 20 minutes to grade one paper, so let’s times that by 190 students, that’s 63 hours I would spend on grading if I tried to read sloppy handwriting. That’s 63 hours of unpaid grading if we would just, as parents put it, ‘do our job’.  We explained this problem to the administration and told them that we had been putting in 12+ hour days to get everything done and they finally listened! They hired 2 more math teachers and now my biggest class size is 28!

This has been the best week of teaching ever! Do you know how much better you can teach when you only have 28 kids in a class? It’s amazing. We get so much more done and I can change the lesson according to the feedback you get from the students, classroom management is easier and it’s not as stressful knowing you only have to keep track of 28 students instead of 40. Now I teach 140ish students- I have graded all papers, wrote lesson plans, made up quiz retakes and been home by 5 every day this week. It’s been teaching bliss. This is how I imagined teaching would be.