Well, Just thought I'd let people know I'm alive and well. With the exception of the rare time I overdo fat/sugar/caffeine, I've been feeling much better.
School is still going well, although I've hated having to be gone as much already. I feel guilty about leaving my students without their teacher.
The frustrations of a teacher have begun as the first six week period wraps up. I have this one class where I can only get a third of the students to turn their homework in on time. I just finished grading the last test i gave...most grades are A, C, or F and there's a correlation to # of missing papers. It amazes me how so many won't ask for help...how they don't use precious time at school to do their math homework when the math teacher is right there to help. What's happened to people? Were "regular" students like this when I was a teenager? It's the rarity to have students who care....
and I've been wondering how much their previous math teachers have made them do certain things...like adding and subracting negative integers, decimals, and fractions. How are so many of them having trouble with ORDER OF OPERATIONS!!!!???? In the efforts to not have students fall behind, are teachers assigning less work? I guess I should sit and come up with a couple of pages of just working with numbers. It scares me that a lot of people are "leaving it to the calculators" But as i tell the deaf ears of my students--if you don't understand it, how are you going to catch mistakes from the calculator because of typos?
*sigh*
Well, time for dinner.
Posted by Anna at September 17, 2006 05:11 PM | TrackBack