Day 8 - TGIF

On Thursday it had felt like the week had lasted forever (and it was only a four day week), but on Friday it felt like the week flew by. I was very tired from getting only five hours of sleep- that's what happens when you procrastinate and wait until 8 pm to start your homework assignment due the next day. I managed to stay awake while we were teaching, but otherwise kind of felt like a zombie all day. Being tired as a student is one thing, but being tired as a teacher is just a bad idea. I need to make sure I get enough sleep EVERY day.

Fortunately for Carrie, her lesson went much better during 4th and 5th period on Friday. We made some improvements to our agenda for the day and the students were more well behaved during the quiz because we made sure they had something to do while they waited for their classmates to finish. Some of 4th period was upset that we didn't let them choose their own groups, but there is no other way to run a "jigsaw activity" like the one we did without assigning groups. * For those of you who don't know, a jigsaw is an activity in which students are members of both a "home group" and a separate "expert group". In the expert group students focus on learning specific material. When they return to the home group, the students take turns teaching their area of expertise to each other.* So, the students had to suck it up and deal with their temporary "loss of freedom", as one student called it. But they quickly got over it and did a good job with the activity. They even had time to watch the video at the end of class.

5th period went very similarly to 4th, but we changed some of the agenda around again. Instead of showing the video at the end of class, we showed it after the quiz because it connected the last lesson with this one. 5th period generally did well with the activity, but may need a little more time with their home groups on Monday.

We are hoping that at some point soon we will be able to rig it so that we start off teaching a lesson to 4th and 5th period so that by the time we get to 1st period we are comfortable with the lesson and have time to make improvements. Hopefully that will make our lives easier.

Now it is Saturday and I have to write up Monday's lesson, which shouldn't take long, do some homework assignments, and get to work grading worksheets and quizzes.