The weeks are flying by

I can not believe that another school week has ended. With each week that passes by, it has become easier to settle into the classroom. Still though this week brought with it a few challenges.

With so many students in the classroom, it is very hard to ensure that all the students are learning at the same pace. Some will complete the classwork and homework with ease. For others, the work is more of a challenge and these students will take longer to finish, make many mistakes, or only do a few of problems. It is nearly impossible to help those students who are behind since their are so many students to get to. Here the teaching mentality is that you direct each lesson to the entire class.

During classwork time, I am able to help those students who have questions with their problems one-on-one. It is frustrating to see other teachers during classwork time correcting other work rather than helping their struggling students. I also always review the homework from the previous day to help make sure that the students understand the content. Most of the other teachers here begin their class period by assigning more classwork without discussing the previous days homework and without giving any new instruction.

This seems to be the biggest difference from what I am used to. The focus here seems to be that the students are constantly doing work while the teacher is constantly correcting their work. Therefore it has been a challenge teaching from a different perspective.

This past week in math, we worked on solving addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication sentences with missing parts while also showing the work. For example 50 divided by ___ = 10. Students had to solve the problem and show how they solved it by using long division. Next week in math, we will begin a two week unit on telling time and word problems involving time. In English class, we worked on the future tense where you need to use the word shall for first person pronouns and will for second and third person pronouns.