Do you ever read blogs and twitter and be in awe with the awesome teachers whose class you want to be in?
Me too.
And can't they also be intimidating? Like nothing ever goes wrong for them?
At least those are my thoughts. And my insecurities raising their ugly heads. So today I'm going to be an illustration of how things can go terribly wrong.
I decided to try something I'd never done in class to review operations with rational expressions. I've read a lot of people describing how they've used Speed Dating (K8's description was the first I'd seen) in class so I decided to give it a shot.
Class #1: Ouch.
So many problems.
1. Rational expressions (aka fractions) aren't easy for a lot of kids. And the problems that I used were too hard to do in a short-ish amount of time.
2. In creating the problems and answer cards yesterday I did a super bad job. Lots of mistakes in the answers. Ugh. (But there was celebrating when they got something right that I messed up.)
3. I didn't think through the physical arrangement of the room. I was asking kids to move their desks, but then we didn't have enough room and had to move more, etc. And to add to that, we have concrete floors so every time a chair (or desk) moves, it makes a horrible screeching sound. I was really feeling bad for my downstairs neighbor because I know they can hear everything.
4. We didn't have a whole lot of time, especially considering the previous 3 statements.
I was seriously tempted to scrap it. But I didn't. Instead, I took my free period (which thankfully was right after that horrible episode) and tried to fix things. I simplified the problems, I corrected the answers. I thought about how to arrange the room.
Class #2: Much better
And so thankfully this time many of the issues had been worked out. The kids weren't a big fan of actually getting up to move (they would have rather just traded problems) and didn't use the "expert" as much as I would have liked, but things were much smoother. Doing the activity felt justified to me.
Class #3: Perfection (if there is such a thing)
I was happy to end my day with this group. I decided that, instead of moving desks, we'd just flip the chairs around so I didn't have to hear the desks screeching (and put back the room afterwards). The kids did a great job of working through the problems, checking answers, and asking questions if they needed to. They still didn't want to move and groaned about it, but it worked out ok.
Will I do this in the future? Maybe. I think it would be better for simpler problems in which we could rotate every minute (or set time amount).
Did the kids get better practice than they normally would have? I don't know about that. We got at most 4 problems done, but they had a chance to check answers and ask questions on a specific skill. Some of those kids would have just skipped a problem on a worksheet that they didn't know how to do; today they didn't have that option.
Me too.
And can't they also be intimidating? Like nothing ever goes wrong for them?
At least those are my thoughts. And my insecurities raising their ugly heads. So today I'm going to be an illustration of how things can go terribly wrong.
I decided to try something I'd never done in class to review operations with rational expressions. I've read a lot of people describing how they've used Speed Dating (K8's description was the first I'd seen) in class so I decided to give it a shot.
Class #1: Ouch.
So many problems.
1. Rational expressions (aka fractions) aren't easy for a lot of kids. And the problems that I used were too hard to do in a short-ish amount of time.
2. In creating the problems and answer cards yesterday I did a super bad job. Lots of mistakes in the answers. Ugh. (But there was celebrating when they got something right that I messed up.)
3. I didn't think through the physical arrangement of the room. I was asking kids to move their desks, but then we didn't have enough room and had to move more, etc. And to add to that, we have concrete floors so every time a chair (or desk) moves, it makes a horrible screeching sound. I was really feeling bad for my downstairs neighbor because I know they can hear everything.
4. We didn't have a whole lot of time, especially considering the previous 3 statements.
I was seriously tempted to scrap it. But I didn't. Instead, I took my free period (which thankfully was right after that horrible episode) and tried to fix things. I simplified the problems, I corrected the answers. I thought about how to arrange the room.
Class #2: Much better
And so thankfully this time many of the issues had been worked out. The kids weren't a big fan of actually getting up to move (they would have rather just traded problems) and didn't use the "expert" as much as I would have liked, but things were much smoother. Doing the activity felt justified to me.
Class #3: Perfection (if there is such a thing)
I was happy to end my day with this group. I decided that, instead of moving desks, we'd just flip the chairs around so I didn't have to hear the desks screeching (and put back the room afterwards). The kids did a great job of working through the problems, checking answers, and asking questions if they needed to. They still didn't want to move and groaned about it, but it worked out ok.
Will I do this in the future? Maybe. I think it would be better for simpler problems in which we could rotate every minute (or set time amount).
Did the kids get better practice than they normally would have? I don't know about that. We got at most 4 problems done, but they had a chance to check answers and ask questions on a specific skill. Some of those kids would have just skipped a problem on a worksheet that they didn't know how to do; today they didn't have that option.
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