Lesson Planning --> Classroom

Being back in the classroom is weird! We have spent half of this week’s class time teaching the lessons that we have been working hard to prepare. So far, I have found myself in the midst of elementary school math classrooms as well as a higher level PE class. It feels strange to be sitting in a desk as a student again. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been attending all of the classes that I am currently registered for. However, I look at these classes as direct preparation for my future career(s). It has been a while since I have learned how to round or perform a line dance.

From having the experience of “being a third grader” learning how to round to the tens place on Monday, teaching Math I felt even stranger. With an elementary school class, most of the things we learn at that left are committed to memory. We have to use those fundamental concepts in every class that follows which allows for practice and internalization. With high school classes, it is so easy to retain the information for a test and then forget it because we are not asked to apply what we’ve learned once we leave that classroom. Once students fulfill their minimum credits, they may not have to take certain subjects ever again. This is especially common for math classes as they are stereotyped for boring and irrelevant. For this reason, high school math teachers face an exceptionally daunting task when making their lessons both enjoyable and memorable.

I discovered this on a whole new level as I taught my function transformation earlier this afternoon. When I handed out my first activity to link to prior knowledge, I realized that some students did not have enough background to do what was expected to be already known at this point in the semester. While I had tried to simplify it done as much as possible by cutting out over 2/3 of my selected NCSCOS standard, I realized that not all of my students were actually ready to be learning what I was about to teach. This hit me pretty hard as I realized how much impact a teacher can or cannot have on their students. Some of my students may have not had a math class since their sophomore or junior year of high school. This is three or four years that they have had to forget their loosely taught understanding of some of the concepts from their classes. How can I as a future teacher make sure that this time gap does not phase their understanding of the lessons taught in my class? How can I make my students more passionate about math so that they will want to internalize what I teach?

These two questions are commonly asked by teachers of all age groups and all content areas. Many have attempted to answer them, but I do not believe there is a cookie cutter answer that will solve it all. The needs of each student are different from their peers and must be treated as so. Teachers must use a mixture of enthusiasm for their content, real life applications and tying in student interests to develop their lessons so students will also find them important and be able to comprehend them. In math, it is so easy to get caught up in the formulas and miss how it is useful in the world around us. My goal is to appeal strongly to my students’ interests by using specific examples that involve them. This will let my students know I am not only concerned with their academic well-being but their personal well-being as well.