I went up in front of class today to go over the warmup problems. This was the first time I have actually gone up in front of a classroom full of kids to teach, so I was a little nervous.
Before I got up, I had to get a handle on the mechanics of what I was doing. The day before I had thought “Let’s just do it. How hard can it be?” But, there is a whole complicated procedure there that I didn’t think about much until I tried it. In this case, a list of all the steps for doing the “warm up problems” (15 minutes) would look something like this:
- First, I put the warmup problems up on the overhead before the students came in.
- Next, I gave the students time to arrive and do the problems. This is when I mingled with them to answer questions.
- When time was up, I had the students trade papers.
- Then I asked for volunteer answers for each problem. Unfortunately, I had no quick way of knowing if they were right, so I sort of had to ask the class if they agreed after every answer. It was kind of slow and awkward. Next time I think I’d better have the answer key in my hand for this part.
- I chose to run through one of the problems in detail because I saw that some kids had trouble with it. I was really nervous that I would do something wrong in this part. I would like to do at least a couple of things right before they see me completely screw up. Fortunately, this time I did it right.
- I put up the answer key and had the kids grade the papers.
- I collected all the papers.
Oh, and I left out the part about passing out the red ink pens so they could grade each other’s papers in red, and probably a couple of other small but important steps. My point is that all of these steps are pretty simple, but before I took over this section of class I had to ask my MT what every single step was so I wouldn’t leave something out or do something differently than the students expect. Otherwise, I was afraid the whole thing wouldn’t flow very well and I would wind up looking kind of stupid.
Then again, I might have to get over the whole “fear of looking stupid” thing if I’m going to be a teacher. Let’s face it, it’s going to happen.
Anyway, it didn’t turn out to be a major disaster, although my MT told me that I took a little more time than I should have. Come to think of it, I did notice that a few of the students were a bit antsy by the time I was done. That’s all right - it gave me an area to improve next time.
The other thing I did was I attended another teacher’s algebra class to start my EL tutoring (that’s English Learner for any non-teachers out there). This first time I mostly just sat by my EL student during class and tried to start up a dialog during a quiet time. Unfortunately this kid has very little English, and my one year of Spanish class was a quarter of a century ago. So, while the teacher lectured, I used the time to go through a Spanish/English dictionary and write down some key math terms in English and Spanish.
I must have come off as knowing more Spanish than I did, because a few times the EL student asked me a question in Spanish, and I had not idea what the heck he was saying. I guess that’s pretty much how he feels during the whole class.
Wow, that’s got to be pretty rough.
After school I wrote a message for my EL student and translated it using Babel Fish. This is truly an amazing tool. I’m going to see if I can make good use of it in our next tutoring session.
