Week 11

Monday in Algebra we did absolute value inequalities. Tuesday was solving formulas and functions for a variable. Wednesday was a short day and I only saw 3 classes so we played @ddmeyer's Estimating Age game which was super fun and mathematical. (His version, my version) Back to work on Thursday with Review Bingo for Friday's quiz. For some reason, missing that Wednesday just made all my students lose their minds. The review Bingo game went decently but that's mainly because I phrased it as vocabulary. There were problems to solve and they did okay, but come Friday, they completely lost their minds. We always review before a quiz and this week was no different. But for each type of problem, a large group of the class would claim having no idea how to even start the problem or what on earth they should do. It was a Friday, they were frustrated, I was frustrated, and we both kind of pushed each other to make it through and get it done. Some classes did not even finish by the end of the hour. After making the key, this 'quiz' ended up being worth 70 points when the biggest one previously was 40 points. I wrote myself a note on the quiz to NEVER USE THIS AGAIN IN LIFE.

I didn't realize until I attempted to grade these quizzes that I just tried to cram entirely too much difficult material in the space of a few days with an early dismissal thrown in the mix. I did not give the students enough time to for the concepts to sink in and make sense before moving to a new topic, related or not. I just left it where it was and didn't worry about remediation because we will be hitting these again in chapter 6 when we are solving and graphing systems of equations and inequalities. I thought the solving functions for a variable would be a great intro into linear equations and slope and whatnot. Which it would have been, considering I hadn't previously made their brains implode.

Geometry this week has kind of just been an epic fail and I don't really want to remember it or talk about it.

That's all I have to say about that.