Blog 7

Prompt: How prepared do you feel in effectively teaching your students reading? Is this one of your strengths? A weakness? Have you started to plan to the Common Core Standards? If you have, how is that going? If you haven't, why not? What support do you need?

I don't particularly feel effective when teaching my students reading. It is definitely one of my weaknesses, as I tend to shy away from word problems due to the difficulty in composing them on my own or finding ones that align to the standards that I am required to teach. I do include reading strategies when I do show students math problems. I usually point out key words and focus on helping students identify the main question in word problems. I also make it a point to use context clues when helping students understand words that they might not recognize. It is a bit difficult since their vocabulary is quite limited. The pacing calendar I am using has formative assessments with plenty of word problems, so I do use those files for end-of-week assessments. My focus tends to be primarily on addressing the steps on solving specific problems. My students tend to lose focus when I dig deeper into the application or proofs of certain concepts. It may be due to the fact that my applications or interests in a standard are not interesting or responsive to them, or that they are just there to learn about a foolproof formula that works every time. I feel both of these cases are true.

Supposedly our pacing calendar is aligned to the Common Core Standards. Indeed, we are focusing more on fewer standards at a higher level of rigor (using the assessments provided by the calendar). The more and more that I look at this curriculum and benchmark testing, the more I feel like our district is being data-driven. I'm being rushed to finish the objectives for this semester even though our students lack the basic fundamental math skills needed to comprehend higher levels of algebra. I still want to focus some more time on skills like integer operations and manipulating fractions. My students are not necessarily demonstrating the mathematical practices expected with the Common Core. They need to show more perseverance in finding their solutions, attend to precision, and reason abstractly and quantitatively. I hardly see any of the other mathematical practices in place, and that may be due to my poor lesson designs. Still, I believe the aura of lethargy that comes with almost every student is astounding. It's almost a cultural norm to have "nothing to do" and this want for "nothing to do". How do we invest our students into what we are teaching them when all we are showing them is something they could learn through a computer? How do we break this cycle without working ourselves into the ground? I'm behind on so many other things (Rio Salado work included), and I don't have as much time as I would like to lesson plan each week. I've gotten better at planning and improvising, but I'm always so stretched for time.

I think some Common Core lesson plans on the objectives that I teach would be very valuable. I'm definitely planning as I go, or as they used to say at Institute: "building an airplane while it's flying." Perhaps this is just first year blues. I hear it gets better the second year...