Less than 4 weeks to go in my 2nd year...

It's hard to believe how quickly this second year has passed and how much easier it was than last year. I feel like I've been much more effective with instruction and just as ineffective with classroom management. That will be my focus for next year. I had the pleasure of watching one of my lessons recently that was video-taped and it was not only horrifying to see myself, but very eye opening to see my posture and (sometimes lack of) presence in the classroom. I know I'm pretty hard on myself, but I really need to focus on getting some better routines and expectations going.

It really is a struggle at times to make math interesting. It's the subject I teach and I believe it is very valuable for students, but sometimes... I lose sight of that myself. I've got to keep pushing the context aspect of it. I've got to keep finding the things that peak my students interests.

I was reminded of this today as my ESL math class was working on posters to present bar graphs they created from collecting data about the class ("What country are you from?", "What is your favorite color?", "How many people live with you?", etc...). I had a few students look up pictures online to enhance their posters. This led to a full on search of pictures and maps of other countries and finally landed us on maps.google.com so that I could show them overhead satellite images of our school and neighborhood. They were enthralled. It was one of those great teaching moments that can make your day, week, or even month feel worthwhile as a teacher.

Anyways, enough with the babble... I started playing with pages.google.com the other night to figure out how I could quickly create a website for my classes for next year and this is what briefly threw together:
Mr. Hale - Bell Multicultural High School

Oh and regarding my last post, I put the final finishing touches on the project I was working on called "Choose a Function". It will get it's first test run this advisory in a few weeks as an extra credit project for some of my students:
Choose a Function Project for Algebra II


-MF EDOOMCATOR