Report from the Classroom

Seeing as how this is my first report about my class, yet I've been teaching them now for two full weeks, I'm not sure where to begin. However, I know some of you are screaming at your screen saying telling me to follow my own advice as I wrote last week and do what any good engineer would do, and start at the beginning. So that is what I will do.

Monday, July 6. It was the second time that I had been in my classroom. If you scroll down in my blog, you'll get some images of the exact scene that I entered - a drab classroom, with a future of events unforeseen nor anticipated, yet expected. Within 30 minutes, I would have a classroom full of students whose future in Algebra 2 laid in my hands.

I wasn't nervous, in fact I felt quite confident that first day. We didn't actually have to teach anything, since the majority of the time would be spent taking a diagnostic. This particular diagnostic was constructed by TFA, and was to be used by my collab (collaborative group - consisting of myself, Michael, Christine, and Jose) to figure out where our students were starting from, and what areas of Algebra 2 needed the most reinforcement.

Perhaps I should lay a little groundwork before I continue, so as to create some structure to the madness that is this blog.

Let me start off by saying that TFA has as many acronyms as the LDS church. I could probably write a dictionary with all the ones that are floating around in my head these days. This collab group that I speak of is a set of 4 CM (corp members) who tag team teach the students in Algebra 2. We work together to give grades, homework, teach objectives, and help the students progress in general. The class time is split into two 2 hour periods, with the first 30 minutes of each period spent in AIH (academic intervention hour). During AIH, we're supposed to use that time to the disgretion of our collab, and review/work on the topics that we feel our students need more individual help with. All four members of our collab are present during that time, and we usually split the class into four smaller groups so that we can give some individualized attention to the students.

The remaining 1.5 hours of each period is split into two, and two CM's are present during each period. We're supposed to spend 1/2 of that time teach, and evidently as I found out this last week, we're supposed to remain a silent observer for the remainder of the time. I teach during the second period with Jose, and we rotate who teaches first each week.

Now, our collab is teaching Algebra 2, which consists of two halves of the year - Algebra 2A and 2B. The first period is supposed to be 2A, and the second period is 2B. Since I'm teaching in the second period, I'm supposed to be teaching 2B for the rest of summer school. Some kids only failed 1/2 of the year, and so that's why they have it split up into two classes.

Now that we have that out of the way, I can continue. Those details are imporant, so if you need a reminder, feel free to refer back to it.

As I had mentioned, this first day we weren't going to be doing anything save the diagnostic. So we were just going to introduce ourselves, hand out the test, and proctor the exam for the whole time, with the 2A diagnostic being administered during the first period, and 2B during the second. I was over the second half of the Algebra 2B period, so if the students finished early, I was supposed to have something prepared to cover whatever time remained until the bell rang.

On our roster, we had 38 students listed. All the experienced teachers told us that if you have 38 on the roster, expect about 1/2 of them to not be there. And so we anticipated the arriaval of 19 students, which was ultimately disproven as the full roster of 38 students showed up in our classroom.

There they were, sitting before me in the sea of grafitti laden, gum ensconced high school desks. Since the summer school at Hamilton High (the name of our high school, which I failed to mention previously) serves a much larger area than just Hamilton High, the students came from all over, and most of them didn't know each other. The first day nerves of unfamiliarity and a new environment kept the students silent. It didn't take much to get their attention, explain the significance of the diagnostic, and pass the test out.

As we passed the test out, we found that a number of the students weren't supposed to be in Algebra 2, but Algebra 1. We dropped to 36 students. After the students had the diagnostic in their hands, another student realized that he wasn't ready for this, and left the classroom. 35.

Now the test was in session. Now, I had taken the exam on my own previously, partially just for fun, and also to get an idea for what exactly we were teaching. It probably took me about 30-45 minutes. During that time, not only did I realize that there were many things I'd need to refresh up on, but I didn't know how to do some of them. So I was pretty surprised when 15 minutes into the test, people started getting done. I hadn't anticipated this...

I'm pretty tenacious in my test taking, and if I don't undertand something, I come back to it at the end and spend whatever time I have left trying to figure it out. As the students began to finish early, I realized that they weren't like that. If they didn't know how to do it, they moved on...

I'd say within about 30 minutes, everyone in the class was done. But we had told them that we wouldn't accept any tests before 45 minutes had past, and so we had to hold them to that. When 45 minutes had passed, we asked who needed more time, and no hands went up. So we collected the test. There are two things to remember at this point. 1. We had planned on having the diagnostic last most of the 1.5 hours after the AIH (first 30 minutes of class where we played a get to know you game with the students) and 2. Jose had the first 45 minuutes of class that day, and I had the second 45 minutes. As soon as Jose had finished collecting the tests, still with 5 minutes left in his teaching period, he looks at me at the back of the room and then says "Ok, now Mr. Woahn has some things for you."

I had planned maybe 20 minutes of material, and now I just had 30 more minutes handed to me. Honestly I wasn't sure what to do for the full time, but my plan had been to go over the syllabus with the class. And by some unknown feat of nature/time-space warp, I was able fill the entire 50 minutes with material to spare, and I believe that the class was engaged for the most part.

I don't plan on going this detailed into every day of the first week, but I did for the first day for this reason. And I just realized I failed to mention something else. Since we're not legit teachers yet, every collab classroom has an FA (Faculty Advisor) who supervises the work we do in the classroom, is legally responsible for the classroom, and gives us practical advice as necessary. Our FA is named Ms. Reisenfeld - she's been teaching math at Hamilton for about the last 20 years.

Anyhow, after we finished our first day, Ms. Reisenfeld came to each of us and gave us some feedback based on our first day interaction. When she came up to me, her first question was "You did very well with your time today - are you a motivational speaker?"

I was flabbergasted. I didn't know what to say, because I can't imagine anyone ever mistaking me as a motivational speaker. Not that I don't believe in my power to motivate others, but as you all know me - I'm not exactly the most dynamic person there is. I always imagine these motivational speakers to be people who are energetic, passionate, with some moving life experience that gets you all riled up to accomplish something monumental.

So I laughed. "No," I said, "I've never done anything like that. That's very kind of you to think so, though."

"Well then," she replies, "Surely you've had experience speaking before, because this definitely wasn't your first time."

I told her she was right - and as we continued the conversation with me telling her that I'd taught Sunday School for the last 5 years, I once again gave silent thanks in my head for the experiences I'd had via the church. This just doesn't go away, does it?

That really concluded our first day. Other than being in the classroom, the rest of our day is filled with these mildly pointless classes and large group meetings where we sit and listen to people talk for four hours. I think I'm supposed to be getting something out of them, but by and large, I tune out. Don't get me wrong, every once in a while they'll nail something that snags my attention, and holds some lasting impression, but the majority of the classes seem to be time fillers, in my opinion.

Obviously, if I wrote this much about every day since that Monday, I think I'd start losing my even my own attention. So I won't, but let me tell you that I easily could. Of the many events that have taken place, there are a couple things that really stood out to me, which I'm going to write about in the immediate entry after this. Overall though, I think I'm going to try and write more frequent entries of lesser length.

Some of the highlights before I move on to my next entry though: student confrontation over taking his hood off, complete rearrangement of our Algebra 2 teaching schedule and class orientation (we're down to 30 students) where we are now teaching the same class for two periods, and are teaching 2A and 2B sequentially, whereas previously we had been teaching them concurrently, results from the initial and final diagnostics (we just finished the entire Algebra 2A course on Friday), 20 hours of sleep during the first week, my first big success with a student, my first flop in the classroom, and the teacher staredown. If any of these things sounds remotely interesting to my readers, please note it in the comments and I'll try to include it in my next entry.

For now, I'm off to dinner. Expect another entry later this evening. Thanks for reading!