I taught a Grade 10 math class yesterday. To those who teach math, this will not be a shocking opening line, but for me, it was a huge accomplishment. I always liked math in high school and I even took calculus in first year as an elective (why? worst mark ever!), but I had not touched a math problem in over a decade. So when I was assigned coverage of a class on medians and centroids, I was nervous but actually quite excited about the challenge.<\/p>\n
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My dear colleague was very patient going over the lesson with me. I was slow and I made a lot of silly errors when we first started doing the questions together. The feelings of panic came over me a few times, and the terrible invading thoughts of, Oh no, she is going to think I am too dumb to do this<\/em>, also entered my mind. But what I found helped me, however, was to think of the students. I know so many kids (and friends) who claim to be terrible at math and that they hate it. But as my mother, and probably your mother, always said, hate is too strong of a word. I believe it can be harder or more frustrating for some, but allowing ourselves to ask the questions we think might of as “dumb” or admitting when we don’t understand something is extremely important. Spending the time to prepare and understand is always essential.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I spent several evenings working on getting ready for that one class. I practised the problems, I watched Youtube\u00a0videos reminding me how to multiply fractions and brush up on my algebra. I even made my partner sit through a lesson with me. We each had a beer for the lesson so it made it a bit more exciting, ha.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n When I walked into class yesterday morning, I felt ready. And you know what? I loved it! Watching students work through problems, ask questions, and help each other through, was so satisfying to watch. I rarely have lessons like that in my French or English classes, so it made me wonder how I might apply what I saw and learned from teaching a math class to my other classes?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I asked the students to give me feedback on my lesson and they said they understood because it had been easy to follow and at a good pace. I went very slowly since I had<\/em> to go very slowly. This was a good reminder for me as a teacher — when something seems extremely easy, I can speed through it as I teach.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Moving forward in the next couple of weeks, I am going to be reflecting on how I could apply more problem-based activities into my English and French classes, and remind myself to slow down and act like I’m teaching a math class for the first time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I taught a Grade 10 math class yesterday. To those who teach math, this will not be a shocking opening line, but for me, it was a huge accomplishment. I always liked math in high school and I even took calculus in first year as an elective (why? worst mark ever!), but I had not … Continue reading “Language Teacher in Math Class”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":277,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-classroom-reflections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/sarahthompson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/sarahthompson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/sarahthompson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/sarahthompson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/277"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/sarahthompson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/sarahthompson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/sarahthompson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65\/revisions\/69"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/sarahthompson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/sarahthompson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/sarahthompson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}