New Testingstan

Negative Knub wrote: Read the discussion and know the context.

I have been. Page 1 and 2 were some pretty generic teaching items. Page three was matrices (which continued a bit into page 4. Then after a quick digression and a potshot of SDN that seems out of context after that post was moved, we moved on to the discussion of salaries, which I did not have much comment on because the salaries you are quoting are completely outside what I see over here on "Liberal California". (P.S. Out here, most public school health plans are pretty good, but the details vary. My district is a no premium/small deductible(w/yearly and lifetime max) plan, but I know of other local districts that have a bunch of options.)

Then after that discussion we got to the "back in my day" comment that irritated me.

I know you wanted to get a cheap shot in with the "Don't let facts get in the way" so you can carry over the ever-loved SDN cred here, but do us all a favor and read the thread before posting.

If I have any "cred" on SDN, I'd be mighty surprised.

P.S. In your initial post you were talking about place value and the fact that 343 means three hundred forty three, and is not just a series of numbers. This skill is directly referenced in the standard I posted regarding place value. I'm perfectly aware of what the standard algorithm is for addition and subtraction, see my latest post for a discussion of vagueness in the standards.

On a more conversational note, I'd be curious to hear how computers are being used directly in the classroom, if at all (I'm sure there are labs, but we also deploy stations/laptops/tablets/PMDs into the classroom for differentiated instruction).

I don't know nearly as much about PARCC's (the testing consortium that Georgia is a member of) system as I do about SBAC's (the testing consortium California seems to be moving towards) system. We're very concerned with having to accelerate our typing curriculum because we're being told third graders will need to type at 20-30 wpm (corrected) to fully complete the assessments at the moment. Have you heard anything on how Georgia is planning to approach the tests?

After observations of third and seventh grade, I vastly prefer seventh. The material currently being taught (statistics) is more up my alley.

My first lessons will take place next week. For third grade, I'll be teaching division by using unknown factors. Unfortunately, few of the students know basic multiplication by memorization and use arrays. So, my partner and I devised a way to use arrays to solve division. It's a pain in the balls.

For seventh, I'm teaching inequalities with triangles. This should be more fun and less demanding, but we'll see when I begin writing the lesson plan.

Note: While I think inquiry based instruction is fantastic, I am not a fan of having to write lessons using a structured template. I'd prefer to write a bullet outline, like I do for every single thing I write.

"Teach it with bullets" sounds like an awesome slogan.

On Wednesday, I taught third graders and yesterday I taught seventh graders. I had fun teaching the former but not the latter. I'll give more detail when I get home.

I have a pretty good idea what the latter was like.

Were the latter a bunch of little bastards?

The third graders were eager to learn and were very respectful. They did the work they were asked to do and were receptive to the questions we asked them. I had a hell of a time teaching them.

The seventh graders were okay, but they were too talkative and just seemed to not give a crap about the work. When my partner and i broke them off into groups, they were talking about irrelevant shit. I had to keep asking them to do the work. They pretended to hear what I said and just kept doing what they were doing. Unfortunately, my partner and I didn't create groups ahead of time, so that played a huge part.

what, do you mean you let them choose who they would work with?

Yes. Their teacher said I could do that.

oh that wasn't meant to be a judgement or anything, I was just trying to clarify what you were talking about

fffffuck, why isn't the latest episode on youtube yet?

evilsoup wrote:fffffuck, why isn't the latest episode on youtube yet?

I didn't know he had his own show about teaching.

I'd totally subscribe to that.

I swear I posted that in the ponies thread
I think I see what you did there

Classroom management is the hardest, most tedious and most stressful part of teaching, but once you have it down it makes everything so easy.

My advice is just to keep the kids busy until they're completely preloaded for the lesson and ready to work. Break up your instructions into bullet sentences and have the kids repeat them to you and occasionally point at a random student and ask him a question about the directions to keep them all on their toes.

I finished my seventh grade teaching today. The lessons went perfectly. The students understood the new material being taught to them. The post-tests were mostly right. They got all of the answers on the worksheet correct and were able to tell me why they were correct.