As Year 2 draws to a close

As the second year of my full-time classroom teaching career draws to a close, I thought I would return to the blog-o-sphere to share my perspectives on what I'm doing, what I'm learning, and how I'm evolving. When I was in graduate school, they had us write weekly reflections about our student teaching placements, and I excelled at those. I haven't really kept up with them since starting my own classroom, as there is so much to keep up with.

My big thing right now is about student engagement. I have begun to develop classroom management skills (still fledgling), I have begun to get easy with the development of a "lecture lesson" - where I'm instructing the students (particularly if I'm helping them to notice a pattern that I'm developing for them). I'm gaining proficiency in creating quick quizzes and other short assessments that help me see if the students have the skills necessary for a given lesson (or have gained the skills after a lesson).

The biggest hurdle I find myself facing right now is the student engagement. I want to create lessons that excite my students about math, as much as, if not more than I was excited as a teenager. I want my students to get intrigued, to wonder, to ask "why?" and "how?" and "what's next?"

Instead, my kids are often asking, "But Mr. G, when will we ever use this?" "Do we really need to know this?" "This is boring!" "This is too hard." or "I already know this." In our current (and final unit), the first one, post-state exam (where the pressure has eased up), I have started to throw in "personal stories" and "launches" that have hooked my students much better than previously. For example, we are currently studying quadratic equations and parabolas (specifically their connection with projectile motion), so I'm using the example of me and my cousin throwing a ball around. I'm also using the example of my model rocket that I built in college. I'm trying to show the students, "Hey, Mr. G's a person too! He's pretty cool, so if he likes this math thing, there must be something to it..."

The other part of student engagement (that I'm still working on, especially for launching next year) is how to engage the kids in talking about math with each other without Mr. G hovering over the whole conversation. That requires building up a whole community of discourse - my task for the fall. Right now, I'm just hoping to get my kids intrigued by the math and say "I wonder what else we can do with it..."