I generously offered to host the math lab at our school at the beginning of the year, before I understood what that would entail. I foolishly thought that a math coach would come in a couple of times and use my classroom to demonstrate how we should be teaching math lessons. That is how it went the first time. And even then I had to participate in extensive planning for that math lab. Today I was the one who had to present the lesson, as all of the other primary teachers at my school, various math coaches, and administrators watched on. If you have never been in this situation then you can not imagine how nerve-wracking it is to "perform" in front of this audience. Needless to say that I have been very stressed out.
To make matters worse, they switched our work email over the weekend so I had to install and learn a whole new system while I was trying to stay in touch with everyone while planning everything. I hate change!
Everything went well. We are learning how to add groups of ten: 3+4=7 groups of ten, so 30+40=70. There were the typical "teacher moments" when the students said impossibly stupid things and I just wanted to scream, "What the hell are you talking about!!!" Like when one of my brightest students answered the question, "How did you get seventy from seven?" by saying, "Add a D." What?!?!?! Oh--sevenD, seventy. Or when another student tried to explain how they had added 30 markers and 50 markers by saying, "First, look at the triangles." I still don't know what that was all about. For the most part they got the concept and we'll move on, privately, tomorrow.
At the end of the day I just wanted to jump in the car and head home. But no, we had parent conferences until 7:30. I didn't get home until 8:00.
After a long, difficult day, a pretty good ending.
No comments:
Post a Comment