About Me

Clearbrook, Minnesota
I am a senior at Bemidji State University. I Majored in Secondary Math Education, General Mathematics, got a Space Studies minor, and also my coaching license. I love to play sports, music, and be outdoors.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

ASSIGNMENT FOUR

This assignment has me look at my goals from the beginning and discuss if I met them or not.  I have listed the goals below, and each one is linked to a discussion of how it is met.  Click on the goal to see the discussion.

  1. Learn each students’ name.
  2. Make a connection with each while teaching, discussing hobbies, etc.
  3. Learn how to have a good control in class while promoting cooperative learning.
  4. Soak in as much information from cooperating teacher and supervisor during experience.
  5. Make learning fun and exciting for each class


The other part of this assignment is to explain a meaningful experience that happened while student teaching.  There were so many different ones with different personalities its hard to pick one.  The one that I am going to describe is one that I felt helped me as an educator be more engaging.

     This experience was a bittersweet one.  It was my first class of the day.  I had a student with their cell phone out in class so I told him to give it to me and he replied with a not so nice profanity followed by no.  Obviously I sent him to the office and then continued on with teaching.  As we were doing our assignment the class was very uneasy, talkative, disruptive, and unsettling.  I could feel my patience on the edge and I finally raised my voice and made them work quietly alone for the rest of the hour.  This worked relatively well, but the meaningfulness came in the next class.  As I began and had a minor disruption I didn't realize it but one of the students made a whimsical comment of "why are you so crabby?"  I didn't pay any attention to it at first, then while they were working I thought about it and realized that I had let that first class of the day affect my next class when they hadn't done anything wrong.  This was profound to me, and I have been really trying hard not to let previous classes ruin my mood and or level of cheerfulness.  This pleases the students and me too, a win win situation.

Sunday, October 31, 2010

ASSIGNMENT THREE

To see assignment three click here

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Unit of Instruction for Precalculus (Number Patterns)

     This is chapter one of my precalculus class that I am teaching.  All of the materials for the unit will be displayed in this post at various points.  First, here is a link for my unit outline.


     Some useful resources I have found for this unit and any other mathematics units are as follows:
  1. National Library of Virtual Manipulatives 
  2. Illuminations - NCTM  
  3. Good visuals that you can subscribe to or use for 5 min. 


   A few lessons from the unit are given below: 


  1. Arithmetic Sequences
  2. Lines

   Here is a link to a student's work that was of lower quality.  They didn't show any work or to complete problems. See Here.


   Here is a link to a student's work that was of higher quality.  Notice the attention to detail and completeness.  See Here.
 

   For the guidelines of the unit assessment and the point distribution throughout the unit, click here.


   If you have any questions please ask.  Thank you.