First Three Weeks

So, it's been a while since I've written anything here. That's partly due to my other full-time job (tech coordinator for my building) dominating my time at the beginning of the school year, and partly due to not wanting to plan too far ahead until I saw how things were going with my students.

So far, things are going okay but not fantastic. I'm one day "behind" what I had blogged about (over-planned as usual, but not as badly as before) - so what I have for "Day 14" on my last post (which the plan was to teach today) won't happen until Friday, Day 15 (reminder that we don't meet on Thursdays). The students seem to be adjusting fairly well to my class (and, since most of them are freshmen, to high school), and they've done well as a class on the first couple of assessments.

On the not-so-positive side, they haven't quite bought in as much as I would like them to. It's been a struggle to get some of them to think and explore and inquire. That's not a huge surprise, but still disappointing. I'm hopeful that as we go along they'll want to sit back and receive less often and step forward and do more themselves more often. We'll see.

Here's the direct link to this year's class blog if you'd like to follow along, and note an additional page on this year's blog that pulls in the students' individual blogs. The two blogging prompts I've given have given me some interesting insights (including that it's going to be a struggle to get some of my students to blog in an Algebra class). Baby steps, I suppose.

Now that the beginning of the year madness with the tech part of my job has slowed down a bit (still there, just not quite as crazy), and now that I know my students a bit and can make some more informed plans, I hope to begin blogging again here about my plans for Day 16 and beyond.