I spent most of this week on required classroom observations. Hard to get into a classroom in the summer, but our instructor is an assistant principal at a middle school where summer school is just now ending.
The story:
In an 8th grade math class filled with English language learners, the teacher, who told me she normally teaches 6th grade, was covering linear and non-linear forms, as well as proportional and non-proportional linear equations. After about 90 minutes of listening to the teacher tell her students that their straight lines were non-linear, I asked to speak with her while the students were doing problems and asked her about the objective on the board that mentioned proportional and non-proportional lines. Her students were drawing straight lines that she was calling non-linear. She listened to me and went to her district-designed summer school lesson plans to review. After a short break, she retaught the class about proportional and non-proportional linear equations. I was worried that her class would not understand the correction, but the next morning in the same class I watched as student after student identified proportional and non-proportional lines reciting if the line passed through the origin or not.
The story:
In an 8th grade math class filled with English language learners, the teacher, who told me she normally teaches 6th grade, was covering linear and non-linear forms, as well as proportional and non-proportional linear equations. After about 90 minutes of listening to the teacher tell her students that their straight lines were non-linear, I asked to speak with her while the students were doing problems and asked her about the objective on the board that mentioned proportional and non-proportional lines. Her students were drawing straight lines that she was calling non-linear. She listened to me and went to her district-designed summer school lesson plans to review. After a short break, she retaught the class about proportional and non-proportional linear equations. I was worried that her class would not understand the correction, but the next morning in the same class I watched as student after student identified proportional and non-proportional lines reciting if the line passed through the origin or not.
