I would like to try to summarize my blog entries more carefully for the next few remaining weeks for it seems that my fellow readers have had trouble taking them all in at once. In fact, I will have no difficulty doing so because for this week of class, I taught my second lesson on Thursday. The lesson took over half of the class time, which I will go in details for in a separate blog entry.
On Tuesday August 3rd, the class worked on more Angles for Math, answering the questions of the students, the pie charts that they had to do from the annual or weekly salary data that the students find from the "Nickels & Dime" newspaper article. For the pie charts activity, which the class worked on in the first half an hour of the class, was very interesting because there was Math and a great reading comprehension discussion going on. As always, Linda did a great job of incorporating both subjects (Math and Writing/Reading Comprehension) in one activity. The article was very interesting and it even got students that don't usually participate, raise their hands to make comments. The article follows the life of a very poor woman who is a single mother with 6 children trying to make enough money for rent and support the children with a part-time tutoring job that only pays $10/h.
We also worked on Quadrilaterals in the last hour and a half of the class. This time, Linda first did a 20-minute lecture on perimeters and areas of quadrilaterals and explained the packet that she handed out to the class. She then gave a chance to the students to work on the packet at first individually and then in groups just like last time with the Angles. This was a lot more successful and she and I went around and checked people's works u
On Thursday August 5th, the first hour and a half or so, I taught my second lesson: "Run-ons". There will be a separate blog on it where I describe extensively. On the second half of the class time, after students took a break, the class went over their "double entry" assignment where they had to pick out quotes from the Introduction of "Nickel & Dimed" book and write their opinions on it.
Students were very inspired by what they have read and it was obvious that they have all taken the time to at least read part of the assigned reading because everyone handed something in. In addition, most students raised their hands to share the quotations they found with the class, which was very impressive.
At about 8:30 pm, Linda collected students' works and moved on to do Math. Although most of the time of the class was spent doing English grammar and the reading comprehension and discussion, the teacher made sure to also incorporate ate some Math in. In fact, they had to take out their Quadrilaterals packet that they had to do for home work. I think it is very important to go over home work because students feel the necessity to do their assigned work outside of class.
Although at first it was planned to have the students write the answers on the big papers with markers, since there was not enough time, Linda used the overhead projector to get the images on the board and ask the students to come up to the board and explain their answers to the class.
One thing that was important was that although there wasn't much time, Linda did not rush through the problems just so that she could say she went over the whole thing before class finished. No. She made sure everybody comprehended every question and its solution and answered students' misunderstandings as well. Then at 8:57, even though there were only 3 minutes left to the end of class, she asked the students if it were alright to do one more problem with them and they replied: yes, for sure. The way students answered her showed their enthusiasm for learning and comfort of being in the same page with the teacher and with the class.
The last problem was pretty straight forward but the students needed to have used decimals to answer the question correctly. The teacher told the students to not be afraid of decimals and use it if necessary in GED Math. It was funny that she mentioned this to the class because I have always been "afraid" of decimals ever since I learned them, since Elementary school! But she is definitely right, because dealing with decimals in the world of Math and in our world even, is inevitable!
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