Friday, April 7, 2017

Helping students while I'm a "sub"

So today was interesting and exhausting!  One of my teachers was home sick with laryngitis for the 2nd day and  one was surprisingly out today.  I had told the one with laryngitis that I would be stopping by their room throughout the day to check in on their kids and I ended up having to step into the other teacher's classroom for a few periods to cover since we didn't have enough subs.

Actually 6 of the 21 math teachers on my campus were out today and only 2 had subs that picked up and showed up for the jobs.  But that's a whole different story.

What was so interesting to me today was as I bounced back and forth between two classrooms for the last half of the day I was able to help students understand the big idea behind what they were doing in their respective math classes in 1 or 2 examples and then they were able to go off and run with the crazy algebra skills tied to it.  

In one Algebra 2 class I was able to help some students understand how to find the least common denominator by giving them some examples from years ago when they were adding fractions by hand.  The sweeties asked if I could come into the classroom more and I had to remind them that today was their second day working on the material so it was going to make more sense now but it reminded me how on the fly some of my examples from previous classes were when I finally had break throughs with my own students.



It kinda makes me wish I had a class for a grading period or just a tutorial group of kids to work with so I can make sure and spend more time with many of them on areas that they are struggling with.  

I wish I could be an IC and a teacher at the same time sometimes!

Or I could just wait for summer school and remember that I'm going to get a handful from many students when we start working with the students that need to retake the EOC test.

I hope everyone else had a great day and was able to have some insights with their students as well!