8 July 2008, Tuesday

TFA has finally cracked me – I didn’t get to run yesterday. My CMA wanted to meet about her brief observation…great. Yesterday’s class was a disaster. Since Thursday’s class didn’t finish because of Mr. Barksdale’s speech, we had to pick up mid-lesson on Monday. I think eventually everyone got it, but it was a challenge. I tried the strategy that my CMA suggested of doing a problem with the class – but only the first few steps before handing them over to try to finish it on their own – and then bringing them back together to hopefully get kids to understand on their own. Though I was skeptical, I gave it a try with good intentions, and it didn’t seem to have any positive effects. The kids who typically struggle still needed individual attention.

Moving Zederick was problematic. He eventually moved, but I feel like it cost me time and class control because as I was dealing with him, most of the class was getting off task, so I had to use more time to try to reign them back in. There just aren’t enough minutes in the class to give each student the amount of individual attention they need to be able to do the problem. I am going to try moving Zederick again today. I tried prepping him for it this morning during math lit hour, telling him during my class he would need to move, but he went off telling me how I was belittling him and that he was going to tell on me for hitting him (for the record I have not touched him or threatened to hit him, much less actually hit him). We’ll see what happens when we get to class.

During class it was problematic because so many students were off task while I was trying to explain the work to the students who need individual attention. I am having trouble giving positive feedback during the class because I feel like I’m spending so much time trying to teach and control the class. I also think its partly my upbringing – when I was in school, I wasn’t brought up expecting to be given rewards for being quiet and doing my work, that was just expected. Obviously, I’m in a different situation now but it’s still hard to make that adjustment.

Yesterday morning, the students took TFA’s final exam. I haven’t graded them all, but so far the results have been somewhat disappointing. I’m fairly certain they will blow their original results out of the water because they didn’t even try, but I think they’ll still be low. It’s frustrating because these are the exact same questions as the pre-test, some that we even went over IN CLASS, and students are still getting simple ones wrong.