A few minutes before class started, Linda asked students to come up to the board and write and solve the problems that they had from the Math Assessment that most students had trouble with. Meanwhile, she was also helping out by doing a couple of problems herself.
At 6 pm, when class started, she asked each student to explain their work to the rest of the class. What I noticed from the questions as Linda had said previously in the first week of classes was that there were real-life situations in most of the word-problems. Also, to be able to comprehend something, students used examples from real-life to better understand each topic. For instance, for the definition of area and perimeter Linda showed how the measurement around the room would be the perimeter and the squares used to make up the floor of the room would be the area.
After 30 minutes of this, she asked students how this exercise helped them and students said that the visuals definitely helped them to better understand the work. Linda made sure all students understood all Math problems before moving on to the next topic.
Then at 6:40, she handed out another sheet of Math Problems for homework to do for Thursday. Then, she handed out another exercise that students completed in the course of the class on Tuesday, at home, and finished on Thursday. For this exercise, students had to calculate the salary and wages of the occupations of their categories. After figuring out the monthly and weekly salaries of at least three of the occupations, they were to make a bar graph of the data found.
As always she modeled it on the board and made sure every single person in the class knows what is expected of him or her. She also modeled a bar graph along with how to do the calculations on the board so everyone can also get the visuals in his/her mind.
At 7:05, she moved on from Math to Writing and asked students to put away their Math and not get confused with what is to be done next. She handed out 'sample papers' and basically did a lesson on peer review. These sample papers were from the 'Lesson Learned' essay that she asked the students to do on the first day of class. However these were actual papers that students from previous classes did. She asked students to come up with constructive suggestions and not just 'trash' the paper. In a way, they were asked to monitor the work in front of them, as a teacher perhaps. Linda told the students that once they have mastered monitoring each others' works, then they can monitor their own. For the exercise, she gave students 7 minutes to work in groups of 3 for monitoring the sample essays.
I thought this to be very successful to actually first work on students' papers but students that they did not know because at first when such a task is given to someone, they might feel like they cannot be completely honest out of shyness or respect of classmates. In this way, they first got to practice monitoring a students' work that they have never seen and then worked on classmates' works and then themselves. This is very successful in my opinion.
At 7:37, she asked the students to 'bring it together' and she started writing on the board the answers to the 'monitoring questions' based on what the class suggested to write. Part of the reason why it was such a successful activity was that all students were participating and volunteering about what to write for each question's answer.
As she was doing this activity, she asked students to practice penmanship and mentioned that in the GED test, if the test-taker has a bad writing, it might really make the person fail because the test evaluators do not take the time to try to figure out what the writing says. And if they cannot read it, they mark it down. I think it is very important to put that fact out there for the students because where else would they have found out about this? It's not like GED preparatory books would include such tips and pointers.
At 8 pm, she moved on to having students monitor the 'professional goals' essays that they had to do for over the weekend.
On Thursday, July 22nd, Linda started the class by doing a demonstration of one body paragraph in two versions though. This was such a spontaneous activity that it caught me by surprise. One of the reasons she did that was that I was working on grading the three professional goal essays that Linda gave to me to do.
The grading process went very smoothly for me because I have seen these types of papers and with a few pointers from Linda, I was able to write tips for the students' drafts. So the reason Linda wrote down the two versions of the one body paragraph was to show the students that when they are writing their body paragraphs, they should learn to develop them and not just list every thing. Linda of course did not mention this and had the students volunteer to say what is wrong with each version of the paragraph and basically walked through the steps with the students to come to that conclusion.
Then, she handed back all the essays to the students with mine and her criticism. She also handed out the 'second draft of the professional goal essay'. Once the students saw the problem about listing the details and actually developing it on the board, then they were able to see it in their own papers as well. She then explained how over the weekend, students were expected to do the second draft of the essay, paying attention to the criticisms they received from their first draft. After she asked students if they understood the assignment or if they had any questions, she moved on to the same topic.
At 6:22, she asked students to take out the Math word problems and asked if they did okay on it. Then she asked them (the ones who can) to come up to the board and do each problem by showing their work. So just like Tuesday, she asked the students who came to the board to do the problems to also explain their work to the rest of the class.
As the class worked on each problem, Linda tried to show the different ways each problem could be solved and other things that could be taught with each section like one problem was to do the average/mean and then also described mode and median that is something that is usually asked with mean of a group of numbers.
At 6:46, when she completely answered everyone's questions and cleared all confusion, she moved on to the next homework that they had to do (still Math). She then asked students to get into their career sectors to go over the homework which was the bar graphs of the salaries of different occupations. Students were divided into groups of two or three to make one huge bar graph on the big posters using the markers provided to them by the teacher. Each group had to either do annual salary or weekly salary. Meanwhile, she went around the room to see how each group was doing and I did the same.
At 7:33, she gave students a 7-minute break especially since some students were done with their work and others were almost done. After the break, she put all the graphs and asked each group to present their work. As she went through each graph, she gave facts here and there and checked everyone's calculations.
She also asked them if or how this activity helped them. I really like the way that Linda actually asks the students to evaluate each activity because it makes the students think about what they did and not just do it because it is required of them.
For the last hour of the class, she switched to the next topic: Angles, so she handed out a packet on that along with the questions of finding the missing angles in each shape. Linda and I walked around to see how each group was doing. As I went around and worked on each problem, the Math came back to me because I was worried I had forgotten everything from high school!
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