#DITL Monday, November 10th, 2016

6:00 Wake up and get ready for school.

7:42 Leave my house for school- I live 5 minutes away and I'm still late. :/

7:54 I have enough time to turn on my air fresheners, clock, and SMART board, put away my stuff and it's time for class to begin!

1st hour- We start math talks with this problem: "Which is greater, 65 x 47 or 67 x 45?" and the struggle is real! Students don't have any strategies to share other than write them on top of each other and multiply them. Students are finishing a handout on angle proofs and then taking a quiz. While they are working, I am trying to cut up task cards for third hour and grade fourth hour quizzes- I always promise to return things I grade the next day and I didn't feel like doing it last night. Of course I'm also answering questions before first hour takes their quiz.

2nd hour- We are finishing cutting our 'slices of pi' for our lesson about radians (Thanks Mimi!). It's taking forever and I start to wonder if it's worth it. We arrange them on a unit circle to visualize the angles in standard position- I question them on what quadrant it's in, if it's close to half a circle or whole, and what that would be in radians. Next we will move to drawing the angles and not need the pi pieces anymore- did I just waste a class period for nothing? :/

3rd hour- We are struggling through number talks again, even though I change the question to just 65 x 7. One student volunteers how he thinks I would do it- they know I base things off of 10's. He suggested 65 x 10 minus 65 x 3. So that was nice. We finish our notes in our INB and then I hand out a graph to each group to work. We debrief and then do one dry erase problem before starting task cards, At the end of class students comment on how fast the class went by and always does- I'll take little success where I can. =)

4th hour- Between classes I am making 93 copies of next week's bell ringer since I am leaving school at 11:30 for a SAT workshop. This is a repeat of first hour. Once again I am trying to grade fifth hours quizzes and get sub plans printed out while also answering questions,

5th hour- I forgot to tell students that I would be gone today and we didn't get as far as I wanted to yesterday. That means I taught them how to solve quadratics by square roots in two minutes with two problems. Luckily, my sub is a retired math teacher. I gave him the answer keys last night and he reworked every problem 'just for fun'. #blessed

11:39 I leave school and head to a SAT workshop that is 45 minutes away. It is also the same SAT workshop that I attended a month ago, ironically, in my last blog post.

2:17 The conference is over and it's the start to my 3 day weekend. Time to shop!

1) Teachers make a lot of decisions throughout the day. Sometimes we make so many it feels overwhelming. When you think about today, what is a decision/teacher move you made that you are proud of? What is one you are worried wasn’t ideal?

A good teacher move was adjusting the number talks questions and some good questions I asked today. Definitely worry about the balance of a hands-on lesson and it's payoff  in trig.

2) Every person’s life is full of highs and lows. Share with us some of what that is like for a teacher. What are you looking forward to? What has been a challenge for you lately?

I'm looking forward to Thanksgiving and Christmas break! My challenge is now that cheerleading practice has started, I'm staying even later to get things done and getting even less sleep. 

3) We are reminded constantly of how relational teaching is. As teachers we work to build relationships with our coworkers and students. Describe a relational moment you had with someone recently.

Our Student Council had a chili supper and a student that's not even in StuCo stayed to help clean up. She stayed longer than anyone else and we ended up talking for almost an hour. I've been trying to connect with her anyway- she's had some intense life stuff going on and needs a good adult role model.

4) Teachers are always working on improving, and often have specific goals for things to work on throughout a year. What is a goal you have for the year?

Keep working on a better work/life balance. I will survive!

5) What else happened this month that you would like to share?

I'm getting a new phone finally!