Wow, there are lots of changes being implemented at my school this year. They say your second year teaching is easier than your first but with all the restructuring that’s happening and lack of support for it, it seems like this year is going to be pretty challenging. One of the major changes is occurring in class scheduling. I am going from teaching five 48-minute periods to teaching three classes, all for different lengths in a given day of the cycle. The school is now following a long-block schedule, in which students have one class for 90 minutes during the lunch periods, five classes for the regular 48 minutes, and drop a class each day, which they then go to first in the next day of the cycle. This is the schedule that the high schools in the city follow. While the whole school follows the long-black schedule, the 7th and 8th grade math teachers also have students for double periods. For instance, my period B students are also my period C students, my period E are also my period F students, and my period D is a single block that comes to my class as they would to any other core academic class. This means that my B/C and E/F classes get twice as much instruction time with me than my D class. Most students in my D class get their second math class in a web-based math class which uses SuccessMaker.
Now, a discussion about the advantages and disadvantages to this new class organization for math could go in many different directions, but for the purposes of this blog I’ll focus on how my first day of school went with this new schedule. On the first day of this year, I saw my B/C class for two and a half hours straight (for double blocks and one of the blocks was a long block), my D class for 48 minutes, and my E/F class for 48 minutes (we dropped F that day in the cycle). I spent hours the day before school started trying to come up with some way to introduce my students to me, to each other, and to my math class in a two and a half hour class.
I didn’t want to start anything content-related on the first day of school, especially since the students (and I) were new to the very long class period, so I decided to introduce some instructional strategies that I would be use throughout the year while reviewing my syllabus and implementing some “getting to know you” activities and community builders.
I first asked students to participate in a Think-Pair-Share with the information they shared about themselves on an index card – their name, hometown, an activity they like to do, what they did over the summer, intended major, favorite food, book, superhero, or something else of their choice. Students wrote for five minutes, shared with a peer for two minutes, and shared out to their group, introducing the peer they learned about, which took about five minutes. I later gave out my syllabus, reviewed some key aspects and asked students to think about quotes I had scattered throughout the document. One of my favorites was by Sam Ewing; “Hard work spotlights the character of people. Some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don’t turn up at all.” Students thought about the quote independently, shared with a partner, listed examples or descriptions of the quote contents, and then discussed as a whole class. To teach students the rules in my class, the five Be’s – Be Prompt, Be Prepared, Be Productive, Be Polite, Be Positive – I asked the class to come up with examples of each and recorded them on chart paper so that each rule was clear and students knew what the expectations were for each one.
I learned a lot about my students through the community builder called Team Resume, which I detailed in May’s post “Getting to Know Our Students”. This activity also allowed me to introduce to students the idea of roles in group work. I assigned the roles of recorder, reporter, timekeeper, and table manager in each group of four, reviewing each member’s responsibilities before students began. Students created a team resume about their group’s education, languages, interests, strengths (both academic and non-academic) and special talents. Each team then presented their resume to the class. To wrap up the first day with this group of students, we played That’s Me! Students who could relate to a statement I said raised their hand and said “That’s me!” It was a nice way to end class and students liked seeing who they had things in common with. The statements I used are below, but you can use whatever best suits your class, grade, and content!
That’s Me:
I like sports.
I enjoy reading.
I am a talented drawer.
I am athletic.
I am a singer.
I enjoy solving math problems.
I am a poet or song writer.
I speak 2 languages.
I speak 3 languages.
I am a good dancer.
I am good at math.
I wish we still had an extra week off for summer vacation.
I will come to math class everyday prepared and ready to learn.