Quarterly Reflections on Professional Growth

Quarter 1 and 2: August 2009-December 2009

To start out, I am so excited about how much more confident and successful I feel this year than I did for my first semester teaching at Rocky last year.

The professional and personal relationships that I’ve made here at Fossil have really kept me going and make me feel like I really can be an awesome math teacher. Scott Wales, Kris Hegdal, Michelle

DiGiovanni, Emily Cooper and I all share an office in the North wing and have supported each other through many things so far this year. I have been paired up with Martha Cranor as my mentor, which has proved to be a perfect partnership! Martha and I work very well together and have learned so much from each other even in this short amount of time. I am so grateful for the interest that Martha has shown in my teaching career. I feel like she really believes in my as a young, first-year teacher which has been inspiring and very helpful. Martha is an amazing teacher and I respect her opinion and have taken all of her advice to heart.

Geometry - As a high school student, I went through PSD when the math curriculum was the

Integrated Algebra series. Because of this, I never actually took a high school geometry course when I was in school. I was a little bit nervous about this because, as much as I love geometry, I wasn’t sure if I had a strong enough background to teach the subject as confidently as I would have liked. I have found that, although Geometry is a challenge to teach as well as learn I have really enjoyed teaching it.

Something that I have been extremely happy with in teaching geometry is that the subject lends itself to more discovery-type learning. It is much easier for me to have the students work on group activities and collaborative learning so that I don’t fall into lecturing to the students more than I should. One of my biggest challenges in teaching geometry, however, was (and still is) teaching proofs. The students strongly dislike doing proofs. This type of math is scary to the students because there is no algorithm or specific steps that they have to follow to get the answer. They need to be able to look at the information that is given to them and use their mathematical knowledge to analyze the information and mathematically explain step-by-step why something is true. This was hard for me to teach because I basically have to teach students how to think mathematically rather than to perform a series of mathematical steps, which they are not used to doing yet. As this point, the students are accustomed to being told how to do a problem and then given multiple versions of those problems to practice over and over. They don’t actually have to reason though the problem themselves. However, even though it is a challenge to teach, proofs force the students to think and reason mathematically, which has been a great learning experience for me and for them!

I have one student in my Geometry class who I have had to work with extra closely. The very first day of class when I had the students working on the diagnostic test in the beginning of the book he took me outside to tell me that he didn’t feel like he belonged in Geometry because he didn’t know how to do any of the problems I had asked them to do. He asked if he could go speak to his resource teacher, Ms.

Coy (who I didn’t know at the time) to ask if he should switch classes. I later learned that Zach is a 2nd year senior who suffers from extreme anxiety. He is still taking high school courses because the ESS department and his parents didn’t feel like he was mentally and socially ready to move onto higher education courses, even at Front Range. The first couple of weeks were difficult because Zach was constantly pulling me aside to tell me that he was feeling anxious about the class and that he was falling behind on his homework for on reason or another. I think we’ve made very good progress since the beginning of the year, but there’s definitely still some work to do. I can say one thing: I know that I am gong to learn a lot from Zach this year. I know he is capable of being successful, he just doesn’t believe it himself yet.

Algebra 1 – My algebra classes have been quite a challenge for me this year. However I have found that most of the Algebra 1 teachers are struggling with the material. One of the hardest challenges with these two classes is the classroom management piece. On a daily basis I feel like I am constantly battling with the students in order to keep them calm enough to learn the information. Even though my goal is to try and use more collaborative learning in my classroom, I have struggled with that in my Algebra 1 classroom. When the students are working in groups, most of my time is spent trying to keep them from veering off track rather than spending my time circulating from group to group to help them understand the mathematical concepts they should be working on. In addition to struggling with the behavior in these classrooms, the material is proving to be quite difficult for the students as well; this is consistent across all of the Algebra 1 classes at Fossil. As a math department we are discussing strategies for interventions, and I would love to be one of the teachers to work with the struggling Algebra students.

I, along with two other math teachers, have attended one session of training for the “Navigator” program

(interventions for struggling math students) and have decided that we are going to try and take all of our

Algebra 1 students who fail 1st semester and put them into this remedial math class. It is designed to get them back on track so that they won’t struggle when they take Algebra 1 for a second time. I have volunteered to teach this class and I am super excited!! The pedagogy that is used in this program is excellent and my goal will be to eventually implement strategies that I learn from teaching this remedial class into my other classes as well. Many teachers are warning me that teaching this class is going to be quite challenging, but I think it’s going to prove as an outstanding Professional Development opportunity for me as well.

Overall Goals/Successes/Improvements - One of my goals this year was to lecture less and to incorporate more collaborative learning. Although I feel like I’ve done much, much better with that than

I did last year at Rocky, it still is an area of improvement for me. In geometry it was much easier to incorporate collaborative learning; however I struggled with it more in my Algebra 1 classes. I think this had a lot to do with the dynamic of the classroom and the type of students that were in that class together. One of my Algebra classes had a lot of classroom management issues.

Another one of my goals for this year was to have more regular contact with parents. Last year I found myself letting students slide by without contacting their parents to let them know they were struggling academically or behaviorally in my class. This semester I feel like I have done a much better job at contacting parents, but there is still room for improvement! I contacted parents a lot for behavioral issues but my goal for next semester is to have more contact regarding grades and academic issues that arise fairly early in the year.. This semester I found that I was so crunched on time that taking the time to call parents and let them know that their student is struggling was so difficult to do. I would like to find a system that would allow me to contact multiple parents at one time to let them know that their student has a ‘D’ or an ‘F’ in the class and then request that they contact me if they have any questions or concerns. This semester I tried to send report cards home to be signed by the parents and then returned to me; this didn’t work out as well as I would have liked. Only a few students brought the report cards back signed so I ended up having to call most of the parents anyway to let them know I sent a report card home and never saw it again. It kind of defeated my purpose . Next semester I am thinking that I will create an email that can be sent to the parents of any of my ‘D’ and ‘F’ students. My goal is to get these emails out to parents as soon as I have enough grades in the gradebook to make a difference.

I’d like to have these emails out a couple of weeks into quarter 3 (before parent-teacher conferences).

My biggest goal for this school year was to never take work home. I have been doing great meeting this goal! Last year I took work home every night and it completely burnt me out. I felt like I was working all day and then going home and working all night.

Even if I have to stay late a few nights, it has been amazing to be able to keep work at work. This separates my home life from my work life, giving me the feeling that I have time to relax after school before getting up early to start work again! This gives me more of a separation between days which has kept my stress level more balanced than it was last year.

Quick Review of my Goals for Next Semester:

 More collaborative learning in the classroom

(keeping students accountable for their learning)

 Continue not taking work home!

 Early contact with parents if the students have a

‘D’ or an ‘F’ in my class  Stay healthy: eat healthy home-cooked food and

find time to go to the gym after work  Quarter 3 and 4: January 2010-May 2010

At the start of this quarter, I was no longer teaching any Algebra 1 classes. Instead I taught two of our four sections of “Ramp-Up to Algebra” for all of the Algebra 1 students who failed in the first semester. No other high school in Fort Collins teaches it and this is the first year that FRHS is using it as a part of their curriculum. Teaching this new class had me facing many challenges like motivation and participation, just to name a couple. However, I learned so much by teaching this course! Last semester when Michelle and I went to the

Navigator/Ramp-Up district training we learned about teaching strategies that would be beneficial in any mathematics course, not just for the lower-level learners. For example, the Ramp-Up course specializes in student-lead instruction where the students will collaborate about a certain set of problems and then “teach” the class what they discovered about the mathematics by writing out how they worked on the problem on a transparency and then presenting it to the class. (I laugh because I feel like using overhead projectors is so ancient compared to all of the technology that we have available to us now, like SmartBoards. ) My favorite part about how the lessons are structured is that there is only

10 minutes of direct instruction to introduce the students to the topics that we will be covering that day and then the rest of it is student-based inquiry learning. On the other hand, I really struggled with implementing this type of teaching with these particular students because the motivation piece was definitely not there. I had many kids who felt like they were “too good” and too smart to be in this class for “dumb kids” so they would refuse to work on the assigned problems because they were “too easy”. They treated the other students in the class like they were better than them which sometimes caused an uncomfortable atmosphere in my class. Classroom management is definitely my biggest area of improvement as a new teacher so working with this type of student group has been tough. What I struggle with the most is what to do with the individual students who refuse to work and to listen to me when

I ask them to do something. Many other teachers that

I have sought advice from have told me that I need to get them out of my class. Either give them a formal write-up with the deans or tell them to leave class in the moment when they are being defiant. I’m hesitant about this, and I’m not really sure why. Maybe I feel like if I try to get the formally removed from my class then I’m giving up on them…? Maybe this is my new- teacher idealistic mind-set that is talking, but I feel like I want to try all other options before I just kick him out of class. I tried working with his counselor,

Nick Peterson, a lot which was pretty helpful.

Throughout the semester I definitely made progress and gained the respect of many students in the

Ramp-Up classes but there are many things that I know I would do differently next year if I was ever in this situation again.

As for the success of Ramp-Up as a class, I think that I’d have to teach it for more than a semester to really get a good idea on whether or not the Ramp-

Up course would be a successful intervention. It’s a shame that we don’t really have the money to implement Ramp-Up again because I feel like

Michelle and I have made a lot of progress with it and would probably be more successful if we had an entire year to teach it the way it was meant to be taught. It is a really good program and could really benefit our students if it was implemented the correct way. If anything, I hope to take some of the teaching strategies with me next year to use in my Geometry and Algebra 1 classes.

This year Michelle, Scott, and I offered to teach a new type of intervention course for next year where we are going to target 60 of our lowest level Algebra 1 students coming in from the Middle Schools and put them in the same class to try and implement tiered instruction within the course. The idea is that we will start out in the Roundhouse will all 60 students and eventually split them into groups based on their ability level. We’d like to see them everyday (do a double-block type course) but I don’t think that we’re going to have the resources to do that. Ideally we’d like to teach the section together with all 60 students, quiz them, and then split them up based on how they understood/mastered the lesson. We’d split them into low, medium, and high groups for intervention and extension work. I’m really excited about this class but really nervous too. I think

Michelle, Scott, and I work extremely well together so we could be very successful as a team, but having 60 low-level Algebra 1 students all in the same room could be potentially hard to manage  Even though I face many challenges as a new teacher, my year didn’t go without a lot of successes either. I am absolutely confident about my professional progress this year and am so pleased with everything that I’ve learned and contributed to

Fossil. My biggest success this year was the progress I made with Zach. This year he got to walk at graduation because he will be attending classes at

Front Range Community College in the fall. It would take me a very long time to explain all of the progress that I made with Zach, but to sum it all up I guess I would say that the boy on the first day of school this year is not the same young man that passed my class at the end of the year. There were a lot of ups and downs, but what I’m most proud of is that I never gave up on him. As easy as it would have been to let him slide through the class because of the sympathy I had for him and the anxiety he felt when things got hard, I never backed down. I constantly told him that I knew he could do it and that he should be more confident in himself.

Eventually the confidence I showed in him rubbed off on him and he started to feel confident in himself; although, I can’t take all of the credit. There was an amazing young man in that class, a senior, who reached out to Zach from day one and was my constant helper when it came to him. It was amazing for Zach to have a peer, someone besides a teacher, who believed that he could be successful! The proudest moment I had was towards the end of this semester when Zach had to teach the class how to do a problem as part of a group project that I had assigned. His group and I made sure that he didn’t have a problem that would be too difficult for him, but he got up in front of the class with no problems and taught them about surface area! It was incredible to watch him at the front of the room playing the role of teacher with confidence that I wasn’t sure he’d ever find. That is one of the moments that make you believe in yourself as a teacher. My experience with Zach confirmed for me that I am absolutely in the right profession. No matter how frustrating can get, if you can impact the life of just one student then it’s all worthwhile.

At the end of the year we found out that Rob

Bates is no longer going to be our department head; next year it’s going to be Andrew Wind. I’m a little bit sad about this because Rob and I have developed such a good relationship this year! Rob has been so helpful and supportive of me as a new teacher and he is a big reason why I have felt so comfortable at Fossil. Andrew and I have never spoken a word to each other this year and usually at the department meetings he keeps to himself and spends the entire time grading papers (which is why I was actually really surprised that he applied for the position).

Hopefully Andrew and I will get along just as well as

Rob and I do, and I’m excited to actually get to know him a little bit better next year. I can tell that he has some ideas for changes he’d like to see happen within the math department next year so hopefully they’ll be good changes!!

In closing I just have to say how grateful I continue to be for the relationships I’ve developed at

Fossil. I feel like the teachers that I share an office with upstairs all take care of each other and the other math teachers and I collaborate so well together. Even the smallest things like making copies for each other without asking and checking each other boxes when we’re downstairs don’t go unappreciated. I probably would not have made it through this year without their support 

 Finish my induction binder by the end of next year

 Get double blocked Algebra 1 classes implemented for

the following year (RtI)

 Re-apply for UNC Math TLC masters program starting

summer 2011

 Stay healthy: go to the gym more often!

Quarter 5 and 6: August 2010-December 2010

This year I finally feel like I really belong as part of the staff of FRHS. At Rocky I never really felt like I was really a part of the staff for many reasons and my first year at Fossil was just spent getting to know people and figuring out all of the norms in the school. Being a returning teacher (no longer a newbie) I really feel like I belong here. It’s a really nice feeling. I feel like this semester I’ve felt more comfortable speaking up and volunteering for things now that I am a little bit more comfortable in my own skin.

Teaching Geometry for the second time has been so much fun and is by far my favorite class to teach.

Last year I spent a lot of time familiarizing myself with the curriculum so it was fun being able to plan lessons while knowing what was coming up in the course. I could modify my lessons based on what topics would come up again and which topics I felt didn’t need as much emphasis. I think teaching

Geometry next year will be the year that I can really refine my lessons. My goal for this year, or maybe this summer, is to create a binder full of all of the hard copies of my lessons so that it will be easier to plan next year. I have all of the electronic copies of my lessons but I’ve always been more of a concrete person. I like to see each lesson printed out and organized in the order that I taught them with all of the supplemental activities, quizzes, etc. that went with them. One of the biggest things that went much better this year was my lesson in proofs. A lot of it had to do with the fact that Michelle (who figured out the pacing guide for Geometry this year) figured in a lot of extra time on the poofs section since the students struggled so much with it last year. With the extra time and now going into the lesson with a little bit of a background in teaching proofs I made sure to frontload the problems that many of my students had last year. I had the students make a “flip-book” to use as a cheat sheet. This flip book was composed of all of the “given” information that was most often seen in the proofs they would be working with and what conclusions they should be making from this information. I think this made an incredible difference in the students’ confidence with the material. It felt good come test time knowing that my students would be so prepared for the proofs portion of the test when last year I wasn’t so sure (and yes, they ended up doing much better on the proofs part of the test than my students did last year…success!)

One thing I struggled with, and continue to struggle with, this semester was the behavioral issues in one of my Geometry classes. It is a small class (only

17 students), but it is comprised of many upper classmen who’ve already failed the class once before and only want to get through so that they can pass and receive credit for it. Not to help matters, it is the last period of the day so by the time all of the students get there they are ready to be done with the day and don’t feel like working too hard in a class they don’t care much about. I know one of the students in the class in notorious for the problems he sometimes causes in class, but I tried really hard not to start the year off on a negative foot. I am a firm believer in giving every student a clean slate when they first walk in my door; I try not to take the opinions of other teachers too much to heart before I can make up my own mind about the student. It’s really hard not to loose my patience with them sometimes, but everyday we seem to take a step in the right direction. There was one incident this semester with this class that really upset me and I hope that I handled it correctly. There was a day that I was attending meetings in the building so the school was paying for a sub for me. Around 7th hour I walked passed my classroom and one of the girls from my class was leaving to use the restroom. I asked her how it was going, to which she replied “It’s awful in there Ms.

Shaw.” Apparently the sub had a stutter and many of my students were making fun of her because of it and being extremely defiant towards her. I was crushed. I felt like I had made so much progress with that class and I was very disappointed to hear that they were being so disrespectful to a guest in my classroom. I didn’t know what to do so I immediately went to Ryan Wulff’s office to tell him what I heard. I asked him what I should do and if he would help me take care of it. He said he would the next day, but I never heard back from him. I decided that I couldn’t let this slide and that I needed to enforce some sort of discipline on my own. Upon my return to the class a couple of days later I started out by sternly telling them to take out a piece of paper and a pencil; they immediately knew I was upset about what happened with the sub. Of course they had all of their excuses and all of the reasons why the sub deserved to be treated they way they treated her, but I wouldn’t hear any of it. I told them I didn’t care who it was or how the sub was acting; the way they decided to handle the situation was inappropriate and immature. I made every one of them list what they did wrong that day at the top of the paper, and then at the bottom they wrote a letter of apology to the sub. Most of them were very well written and very heartfelt so I put them in a folder in the front office, called the sub to apologize in person, and told her that she had a stack of letters waiting for her to pick up when she returned to Fossil. I am very pleased with the result of the way I handled that situation. I didn’t want to punish them just for the sake of punishment, but I think making them write a personal letter to the sub really taught them a valuable lesson about how others should be treated, especially a guest in our building. At any rate, I haven’t had a single problem with a sub with that class since then. In fact, the last time I had a sub their class got the best report!

This year in our attempt to target our struggling math students, we created a class that is team-taught by three teachers. Basically Kris Hegdal, Michelle

DiGiovanni, and I shared 60 freshmen students in one class. Originally we had the vision that this class should be double-blocked so that we could teach the lesson one day and then do supplementary activities or enrichment activities the next day, based on how well the students understood the information. Since we don’t have the means to double-block the class we decided to differentiate the students based on their unit exam scores. After each exam we broke up the students into high, medium, and low groups based on their test scores. Teaching this class was definitely a neat experience and we tried really hard to make sure that even though we had to slow down the curriculum we made sure not to “water-down” the lessons too much. Even though these students have very low math skills, the class needed to be designed so if they pass the class they will be prepared to be successful in Geometry and the eventually Algebra 2 for those students who decide to move on. We tried to decide what were the most important topics of

Algebra 1 and focused on those.

In the first semester of algebra 1, Chapter 3 is the most important chapter. If students don’t know how to solve equations with their eyes closed it is very unlikely that they’ll be successful in Geometry and it’s almost certain that they won’t be successful in

Algebra 2. (By the way, being my second and a half year of teaching in the district, I have to say how extremely helpful it is to have taught the classes that come after Algebra 1. It makes it so much easier to prioritize my lessons, especially in this remedial class, so I know what will be important for the students to know later on and not just in my class.)

After the first chapter 3 test (we split chapter 3 into two sections) it was clear that 75% of the 60 students were not ready to move on. 75% of the students got a

D or below as their test score. Kris and Michelle were hesitant about holding the students back more considering we were already behind all of the

Algebra 1 classes, but I wouldn’t let it go. In my belief, if we continued on through the curriculum we were just setting the students up for failure. Until they were comfortable solving equations they could not be successful in the rest of the course. We decided to put the 25% who passed the test in a class with

Michelle where they would move on in the book. The rest of the students were split up between Kris and I.

After more and more practice of solving equations with my class I knew it wasn’t a mistake to hold them back for a while. Many of the students made great progress with the solving equations skills! Even though they may not have mastered the skill by the time we moved on, I could tell they were much, much more comfortable with the material which made a big difference in their abilities throughout the rest of the semester.

Unfortunately, even with our careful selection of students from the Middle Schools to be in our remedial class this year, we still had many students who ended up failing Algebra 1. The administration decided that we should create a new class next semester that will give these students the opportunity to retake the 1st semester of algebra 1 so that they can take the 2nd semester of Algebra 1 in the summer and stay on track to take Geometry next year. We decided to use the online math program called ALEKS to guide the instruction in this class and I was asked to teach it. I’ve been doing a lot of research about the

ALEKS program and I’m very excited to try and use it with the class next semester. It seems like it will be a great supplementary tool to help the students fill the mathematical gaps that they have.

 Finish my induction binder by the end of the year

 Get double blocked Algebra 1 classes implemented for

the following year (RtI)

 Make binders to hold all of my lesson plans for easy

organization next year Quarter 7 and 8: January 2011-May 2011

This last semester has been an extremely eventful one; I don’t know if I’ll even be able to include all of it in this reflection! The biggest challenge this semester has been the tension that has developed in the math department over the new “leadership” that was appointed at the beginning of the year. There has been a lot that has been going on, but to sum it all up I feel like Andrew treats the rest of us in the department as his employees and sees himself as an authority figure that has the right to tell us what we can and cannot do. I am fairly new to all of this so at the beginning of the year I wasn’t sure if this is actually how a department is supposed to be run.

Now that we’ve gotten into the year a little bit more I feel like the role of department chair should be presented more as a representative for the voice and common good of the department and less like our boss. Many of the teachers in the department are frustrated because they don’t feel like their voices are being heard and that the communication from the administration to department chair to department and vise versa is not being properly passed along; kind of like the game of telephone where everything gets jumbled up by the time it reaches the last person.

I want to tread lightly here because making assumptions doesn’t do anything but get people in trouble, but the particular incident that made me the most upset this semester was how my request for double-blocking Algebra 1 classes was handled. At the beginning of the year when we have to turn in our goals to the administration, I made one of my goals to make sure double-blocked algebra 1 classes were added to the schedule for next year. I was told that with the new schedule and adding one more class that my request would most likely be a possibility. In each department meeting when the topic of the alignment of math courses came up I made sure to mention the desperate need for more time to teach certain students the Algebra 1 material; some students just can’t handle learning that much material in the time we give them to learn it and are constantly set up for failure. Each time I brought it up I was assured that it would be brought to the administration’s attention, until one day Andrew came back with the news that the administration decided it would be too much of a hassle to double- block algebra 1 classes for only a select few students.

Instead they were going to offer the opportunity for students to take double-blocked calculus classes in order to help these students reach calculus three before they graduated high school. I was so disappointed to hear that news, especially because I could not understand the reason behind the idea that double blocking for an algebra class was too hard, and yet was easy enough for a calculus class. I absolutely understand the desire to give our excelling students an opportunity to reach advanced level courses while they are at Fossil and I think it would be amazing if we had that opportunity for some of our kids, but I could not understand why the

Algebra classes were being somewhat ignored after all of the problems we’ve had with so many of our freshman failing Algebra 1 over the last couple of years. It was completely disheartening and I wasn’t sure where to go from there. If the administration says it’s a no-go for double blocking algebra classes I wasn’t sure if there was anything else that I could really do, but I wasn’t 100% ready to give up.

Andrew started talking about using some of the study halls that would be given to the math department as a way to “get around” not being able to double-block some of the algebra classes, even though we weren’t sure if there were for sure going to be study halls built in the schedule for next year.

This made me feel a little bit better, so I started the conversation with Andrew about whether or not we can target a specific number of students to have the same teacher for Algebra 1 and an Algebra 1 study hall so we could use it as a double block. He seemed a little receptive to the ideas, but I kept getting the feeling of being brushed off. I could never get a straight answer from him and he didn’t seem to realize how important this was to me and all of the other Algebra 1 teachers.

I was almost ready to give up until one day I was talking to Martha about how upset I was that it seemed like we were going to start all over again with

Algebra 1 and probably be in the same situation halfway through the year with multiple of our students failing. The only reason that Andrew could give me was “the administration doesn’t want it” so I really wanted to talk to Dr. Cook or someone on the admin team who might give me a more specific reason, but I was very wary of this because I have been warned in the past to always try and go though the department chair to communicate department concerns with the admin. Voicing this concern to

Martha she decided right then and there that we would go straight to Dr. Cook’s office and talk to her about the situation. You can imagine how happy I was (and surprised) when Dr. Cook was completely on board for double blocking algebra classes!!! It was like a huge weight was lifted off of my shoulders. For so long I had been feeling like nobody wanted to do anything about our poor struggling Algebra students.

To add to all of that, I found out the other day that we are going to being using ALEKS with our double blocked algebra classes which I am doubly excited about! Although, I continue to be confused about why Andrew kept telling me that the Administration didn’t want us to double block Algebra 1 classes when I heard straight from the administration itself that they may have been planning all along to double-block 40-60 incoming Algebra 1 students.

Speaking of ALEKS, I think that it is so great that we are going to be using ALEKS with our double blocked algebra classes next year. This semester I struggled with getting really good data about ALEKS because I feel like one semester is not enough time to really know if the program is going to work well with our curriculum. I’m glad that I’ll have another year to tweak some of the things that I would have liked to do differently to see if it makes a difference in how effective the program is. This year was really hard because my vision was to use ALEKS to help fill in some of the gaps in their math skills, but I also had to try the best I could to get through the entire semester of curriculum. This meant that much of their ALEKS time was going to need to be done at home. I didn’t give them a lot of other homework to work on so that the majority of their “homework” would be to complete ALEKS hours. This year I required them to have a certain amount of hours done each week because I didn’t feel like it would be fair to make them get through a certain amount of the ALEKS curriculum since they’d all be working at a different pace; I know now that this was a big mistake. It is very easy for them to “fake” working on

ALEKS and I don’t think many of them really benefitted from using the program as much as they could have. The few students that did take ALEKS seriously and really put in the effort to work on the problems and understand how to do the math, I saw huge improvements in them! There is one student who got much, much further on ALEKS than we even did in the class (most of the other students were way behind where we were in class) and he always did so well on everything we did! It makes me so happy to see how successful he is being in this class…especially after failing the same class last semester. Going from an F last semester to a B this semester is a great improvement!

Double blocking is exciting and using ALEKS has been an experience, but the most exciting thing that happened this semester is that I got into grad school at UNC next year!! I applied last year and didn’t get accepted because of lack of experience so I applied again this year and I’m in! I start classes this summer and after two years I will have a master’s degree in

Math Education. The best thing about getting into this particular program is that it’s paid for by a grant, which means that if I maintain a 3.0 GPA throughout the entire program the school will pay me back for it! This is the last year they were accepting applications for this particular grant so I feel very lucky to have gotten this opportunity. I can not wait to go back to school and learn some more great strategies to use in my classroom.

Overall this has been an eventful semester and I could go on and on about it all day, but I’ll just wrap up by saying that it has been and extremely successful two years and Fossil and I have really enjoyed all of the experiences that I’ve had and everything that I’ve learned! I have one more year until I’m no longer probationary, but I feel that if everything goes as well as it has the last couple of years I could be at FRHS for a long time. It is a wonderful school with wonderful teachers and staff members and I feel so incredibly lucky to have had the opportunity to begin my teaching career here.