What I'm Loving Wednesday

This year our administration has been doing weekly walk throughs in our classrooms.  It was a bit stressful in the beginning simply because I was not accustomed to having an audience so often.  Now that it has become art of my normal, I appreciate having the feedback on a regular basis.

During one of my observations it was brought to my attention that I tend to save all my higher level questions for the end of my lesson.  We had a good long discussion about it afterward and I was reminded to not ever take the thinking away the students.  I'll admit this threw me for a loop with math.  Didn't I need to spoon feed them just a little bit in the beginning?

I began to really plan for higher level questioning throughout my lessons.  When it came time to teach distributive property, I started the lesson by having my students work in small groups to complete a Sort.  In this sort students were to match the two equivalent expressions that represented the distributive property.

(Click on the picture to find these on TPT)

At first the only directions I gave them were to find the matches.

They struggled.  Oh how they struggled.

After some time of letting them struggle and talk through it I gave them a little hint.

"Matches will include one card with parentheses and one card without parentheses."

They still struggled with it but they began to figure it out.  My teacher heart nearly exploded with happiness at the math conversations that were taking place in my classroom.

My students discovered the distributive property on their own.  They were able to share their discoveries with one another and lead the lesson.  They did all the work.

It was one off those beautiful moments that you wish happened every day.

I instantly fell in love with using Sorts as a way to introduce new concepts.  They are no longer used  just as a station activity.  Sorts put all the thinking on the students.

The One With The Hug

I teach 7th grade Math. To say that my class isn't the most coveted place to be would be a huge understatement. I always hated math as a student so I try to make it as fun and enjoyable as math can be.

With that being said I had a rough meeting with a parent earlier this week. I was told that my teaching style is all wrong for her child.

Though I'm not naive enough to believe that every student and parent will love me, I am a pretty well liked teacher. Students enjoy my class and that is part of the reason I love teaching. It's never easy to hear when a student or parent doesn't feel that way.

After my rough day I had several people praying for me. God definitely answered those prayers. Thursday I had a moment that every teacher dreams of having.

I have a student who really struggles with math. He has to participate in remediation every year because of benchmark scores. He typically has a bad attitude because math just doesn't come easy to him. He never seems to be on task and I feel like I'm constantly asking him to get busy.

Thursday it was like he was a totally different kid. The students were doing some practice on adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing integers. WITHOUT CALCULATORS! They thought I was the meanest teacher EVER! Long division with only pencil and paper! How dare I?!?

This student worked so hard and was on task the entire 55 minutes. He asked for help occasionally, but never once whined or made statements like "I can't do this." He doesn't know his multiplication facts so instead of multiplying 35 by 6, he was adding 35 six times. He wasn't taking any shortcuts. He did every problem the longest way possible and still managed to have a great attitude.

It was one of those moments when as a teacher I wanted to cry because I was so proud. A few minutes before the end of class I told him to go to the office and pick out a candy bar. I was treating him because of his hard work.

When the bell rang, he gave me a big hug and thanked me for helping him and the candy bar. WOW!! That is why I teach! It made the rotten days previous to this one all melted away.

I love for moments like that! I emailed his dad to brag on him. That's the kind of emails I enjoy sending.

Thanks to all those who prayed for me.