This week I wrapped up my unit with my sixth and seventh graders. This unit has been such a learning experience for me. First of all I cannot believe that I just TAUGHT actual students a whole chapter of math content. Holy FREAKING cow. This is what I've known my whole life that I wanted to do and this is what I've been working my butt off for five years to do with my life. The sense of excitement I get from knowing how close I am to being a certified teacher is out of this world and the pride I get from how well my first ever chapter went is ridiculous. I could not have asked to be placed in a better school nor have better students to be my so called guinea pigs for my first teaching experience. I didn't expect to be so thrilled to be in a middle school let alone look forward to waking up every day and going to school to touch the young minds of my students. It brings tears to my eyes just thinking about how much I love the career path I've chosen for myself and everything that comes with it.
It blows my mind how receptive and open my students were to a new teacher coming into their classroom and just taking over and teaching them material that they'd never seen before. To me, that's a terrifying amount of responsibility, especially having no experience doing so before. The students were so helpful to my first 'learning to teach' experience and gave me great feedback about what worked for them and what didn't. And through this I figured out how good I am at gauging students understanding simply by reading body language. I think this was one of the biggest things that helped convince me that I'm going the right direction with my life. I feel the best teachers come with a 'feel' and so called 'nack' for teaching and I'd like to think that with teaching my first ever lesson I found my 'nack' and 'feeling' for teaching; and what an amazing feeling that was.
I guess I should probably start blogging more specifics about my lessons and gushing about my love for teaching a little less. I'll give it a try...
My lesson was over geometric figures and was the first time that many of my students learned any sort of geometry (or at least the first time they learned the figures as specifically as I taught them). The first section covered the basic vocab: Point, Line, Plane, Line Segment, Ray, and Congruent. Students seemed to grasp this lesson pretty well and when they came to class the second day I was able to ask them to come up with real life examples of each and got some very creative responses (Line: the equator, Line Segment: a flag pole). The next lesson (section 2) covered angles (acute, obtuse, straight, right, supplementary angles, and complementary angles), the students struggled the most with supplementary and complementary angles but I was able to give them a helpful "reminder" that straight angles had 180 degrees so supplementary angles add to 180, this seemed to help. They also struggled with reading the protractor, I gave them steps to finding the measure of angles when reading the protractor and those seemed to help but worst case students ended up counting off the "fives" between the rays of the angle. Section 3 was the longest section of the chapter and proved to be the one I struggled with teaching the most. It covered parallel, perpendicular, skew, transversals, and angle relationships formed when a transversal intersects two parallel lines. The first four terms weren't too tricky for students (especially since many had seen them before) but the angle relationships were the most difficult for students and for one hour I ended up having to reteach that portion of the less the next day because they didn't understand it the first time and I was too rushed the first time to do teaching it justice. When I retaught this to second hour I did a much better job of explaining the material using vertical and adjacent angles (which we covered with parallel and perpendicular). And because I knew what not to do for third hour I was able to not have to reteach the lesson for them.
The final two sections on angle measure sum of triangles, quadrilaterals, and polygons and congruent polygons went very well. I did an activity with each class dealing with finding the angle sum of triangles using a straight angle and ripping off two angles of a triangle to lie along the straight angle and find the three angles along the straight angle fit perfectly (aka add to 180, or the measure of a straight angle). (See my other blog post for more on this). Students seemed to really enjoy the activity and hopefully with my next chapter I'll be able to do more of them.
I was really pleased with how all of my assessments of students understanding went throughout this lesson and though the first class didn't do so well on their first quiz (which I had them all correct and explain the correct answers to receive points back), second hours second quiz that I gave them went exceptionally well and no one received below an 80%. And on the test second hour had an average of 83% and third hour had an average of 94%. Which though it's not all about the test scores, it's still a sort of gauge and confirmation of how well the chapter went. And dang, for my first time teaching I'm pretty stinking proud of how well my students seemed to understand the approach I have to teaching and the material I taught them. I can't wait to get back in front of the classroom, but sadly have to give my placement partner a chance to teach now. Which in fact, it's much more difficult to relinquish control now, I don't know how my CT does it every year! I just want to jump back up there and teach my kids!
Once I get my materials from my unit scanned in I'll attach them to this post. Until then, off to the next learning experience!
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