Middle school schedules...

It can be very tedious to watch the same lesson taught 6 times in a day to 8th graders.  How tedious is it to teach that lesson 6 times?  I taught a lesson 4 times one day this past week, and by the 4th time, my energy was certainly low.

In the middle school classes I've observed this past 2 months, none of the teachers mixed up their schedule of lesson plans  in order to give themselves some variety in the day, for example by teaching negative numbers this week to periods 1, 3, & 5 and decimal addition to periods 2, 4, 6 and then switching.  Some, but not all,  did have breaks in the routine where they taught an advanced class. I have been watching to see how they re-energize during the day, and how they keep the lesson fresh.  It seems hard, and having a planning break in the middle of the day helps.

It makes me wonder why schools don't rotate their schedules:  say a student has classes A, B, C, D, and E.  The school schedule could have A be first period one week, then move it to 2nd and move E to 1st, etc.  This wouldn't help with the tedium of teaching the same class over and over, but it would mean that students would get energetic, early in the day instruction in all subjects over the course of a year.





You can get used to anything, but as I have watched the same lesson being taught 6 times in a day to 8th graders, I have been struck by how tedious that can be.  I was the teacher  for a lesson given 4 times in a day this past week, and by the fourth time, my enthusiasm was low.

A calendar!!!

Still looking into how to have this shared by the group.  The share setting changes to "see free/busy time only" every time I try to share it...

Definition of insanity...

is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

I wonder about this with respect to reteaching.  In one of the classes I'm observing, the students who do poorly on tests get pulled aside be to retaught the material, while the others do some sort of enrichment activity.  The students may have failed the test for a variety of reasons:  a bad day, absence from school beforehand, careless mistakes, or not understanding.  The reteaching is done in the same way that the original teaching was done, and does not seem to help the kids who tried but didn't get it the first time around.  This seems exactly the time to try something different, as you have proof that it didn't work the first time around...

Fun in math...

I love the three periods I spend in 7th grade math.  The teacher uses math talk and her own personality to build a safe, friendly classroom community.  In some periods this is harder than others, but even in the most rambunctious class, there is still community in her classroom.   

Some examples of the way she makes the classroom fun and warm - these won't sound as joyful in writing as they are in person, but they truly convey a happiness to be there:

She has the kids answer her phone when it rings during class with: "Mrs. Doe's classroom.  Student speaking.  We love math!"

Good answers get a "Kiss your brain!" which she models by kissing her hand and tapping her head.

She wears a special math lab coat on test days, which has a variety of math equations written on it with permanent marker.  She wears it to bring in the good math karma.

When students don't have a pencil, they get to borrow one from her if they leave a shoe on deposit (so far the kids all treat this as silly). 

She stamps homework and worksheets with a custom rubber stamp which says "Mrs. Doe approves!"

Math foldables...

In my 7th grade math class, I've watched this week as the class has worked on little foldables of math rules to paste into their math notebooks.  The school had a funky schedule with 1/2 the classes meeting every other day because of conferences, so I had time to go home and think about the foldables before the other 1/2 of the classes did them the next day.  The exercise of making the foldables is just cutting and pasting and coloring. There was no discussion of the rules in the math book during this class session, though there was on the days before and after, and I didn't see the value of the foldables.

But then I went home and read some math teacher blogs about the foldables.  The teachers love them!  Here's a link to one teacher's math blog with foldables. I still didn't understand why though.  What math learning objective did this cutting and pasting serve?

Right-side up pic coming soon...

So, the next day in math, I went around and asked the kids.

The kids love them. They like the craftsy aspect of it.  One kid said it reminded him of elementary school, but he said it in a fond way. "But does it help with math?" I asked. They said absolutely, they helped a lot.  As they do problems, they find themselves referring to them all the time.  After class I asked the teacher and she said the same thing.  Before she started doing them, it never occurred to the kids to look back at their notes to figure out how to solve a problem.  She would remind them, but they were unconvinced.  My interpretation is that the kids value the booklets because they've created them, and so are more likely to look back at them than they are to info they've just copied from the board.