Week 9

Week 9 wasn't horribly interesting. My students were still doing probability, but it began to get a bit more extensive. It was a quick chapter, and they ended up testing on Friday! Since I've noticed that my students tend to struggle with paying attention during class, I decided to print out notes for each student and have them sort of fill in the blank. This helped with their attention since they already had the basic format of the notes. Since they had the notes, I was able to walk around more and discuss and also look at the students' papers to see what they were understanding. I also noticed that I was able to ask the students to work on a single problem for a short period of time (no more than a minute) and I could assess how each student was doing by whether or not they had any ideas written down. The students also seem to like having the notes in front of them, so I think this is something I may continue.

On Friday, our CT invited us to the Algebra 4 All Conference. We started by working with nspire TI calculators (which, by the way, are SO cool) and seeing how we could create graphs, lists, and use this data to answer questions. After this, we mostly discussed direct variation and completed worksheets that were given to be used during class time. They presented many interesting ideas to not only question students, but have them actually think about what they did rather than just mimic. They also used the term 'Meyerize' to create questions that questioned the students' understanding. I thought that was pretty entertaining. Other than that, the week seemed pretty simple. On to next week!