Main Area
Summer Vaca Day 11
Posted on June 30th, 2014
A week of running back and forth to my folks helping out and visiting with my brothers. Not much time for reflection.
Chapter one of Marzano mentioned how one English teacher used a poem to get her rules across to students. I said, why not?
My Typical rules are:
I have really easy classroom rules that help keep the classroom a safe place.
Respect: We need to respect everyone else in the room
Reasonable: We need to be reasonable in our expectations and actions. No Extreme behavior.
Responsible: We need to be responsible to get work completed, keep our areas clean and for any equipment we use. If equipment is not cared for, then others won’t be able to use it and it costs money to replace.
So I tried writing this draft:
Bring your pencils, papers, books
Don’t forget your calculator
You won’t get any dirty looks
Be your own Motivator
Let’s not swear or be rude
Let’s work hard while we are here
Don’t give anyone ATTITUDE
Math shouldn’t cause you to shed a tear
One thing I was going to play with this summer is to begin to write raps for classroom use. Maybe this might be one?
Summer Vaca Day 1 and Reflecting on This Last Year
Posted on June 19th, 2014
In the spirit of open practice, I’m going to blog this summer about my HS classroom. If anyone besides a bot is reading this, feel free to leave a comment/suggestions.
The first day of summer break. It was a late night last night. We drove 90 minutes both ways to go see a monster <link>. It was an entertaining show if you are in the area over the next couple of weeks.
Reflecting back on this last school year:
All of my dual enrollment courses went great. We covered the material that we needed and 15 students out of 18 registered earned transferable grades. These 18 students represented 1/2 of the students who were eligible to register for pc, statistics and calculus as dual enrollment students. I’d like to improve on this for 2014-2015. I get to have one of my own children in AP Calculus this next year. Her cohort seems to be a great bunch of hard working students so it should be fun. I also implemented mathxlforschools.com in my Statistics sections and that went well and the majority of students left an evaluation saying they favored it. I am expanding this next year to include my calculus course. My precalculus course uses this textbook <link> and myopenmath.com
What am I going to do this summer? Besides my online cc courses, which are 1/3 over already!
After 26 years of classroom management that worked for most students, but not for all, I am going to work on improving my classroom climate. It was a tough year with one out of control class and one that marginally pulled it together.
How am I going to do this? I started reading Marzano’s Classroom Management that works <link>. Chapter 1 deals with statistical significance and why improving teacher quality is important. Chapter 2 deals with setting classroom rule and procedures. This seems similar to what Wong wrote <link>. I truly believe that I am good at establishing rules and procedures. I don’t think this is the problem. I did have one student tell me that I have no follow through. It will be interesting to see what Marzano has for suggestions to help me there.
One last comment for today: It is interesting reading one of these classroom management books after so many years of teaching. Seeing what I am doing and doing well and remembering about things I should be doing but have forgotten about is sobering. If I am going to keep doing this job, and I want to keep at it for several more years, I need to get this under control.
Enough for today. The “Honey do” list is calling.