First Day (So far)!

Last night I actually managed to get a decent sleep (I can never usually sleep when I'm nervous) but I think that my have had something to do with the cold medicine I took for my sore throat (which did NOT help my sore throat). This morning I got up early and began by mentally preparing myself for the fact that I was ACTUALLY teaching today; then I started actually preparing for class. When I got to the office it turned out that I did in fact break the photocopier...well I jammed it; luckily one of the other teachers was able to fix it (even though several others had already tried). So I managed to run off the copies that I needed for today and all was well in the world!

Then I went to my classroom. I began by trying to figure out how the projector worked; I did not find a remote for it so that ended that. Next I was frantically drawing graphs on the board (which had taken hours to do on my computer I might add) so that I could use the board in lieu of the notes I was planning on projecting. Another teacher was walking by and informed me that you don't in fact need a remote; there was a switch to turn it on on the desk, all of my stuff was covering it! I still could not find the cord I needed but then another teacher told me where it was and said it was dirty so that I should get one of the kids to do it; "get the kids to do it" seems to be a popular solution to problems here (not necessarily a bad one). 

Then, all of a sudden, my students were there and I thought I was going to start getting really nervous. I introduced myself in a much more brief manner than I had planned on and all that was going through my head is "at this rate this class will be 20 minutes long (instead of 90)." Then I began to go over the words from the unit that I have defined on our "Word Wall" and that's where stuff slowed down; a lot of the terminology is new to them.

The students were then to brainstorm and write down what they remember/ think is important about exponents and exponential functions; it was interesting to see how confused they were at the idea of this kind of task, they had clearly never been asked to do this before. The activity ended up not being extremely helpful until one girl shared her answer it was the laws of exponents, then more students were asking questions about terminology and rules. 

The students were then assigned 4 questions from the text that were to be review. I have never seen a group of kids working so quietly. Some of them however were just being quiet and not writing anything down; mostly because they were confused about the meaning of the word "asymptote." During this brief work period the students asked a lot of good questions.

We ended up not getting nearly as much as I had planned on done (which was kind of a relief since I thought it may not have been enough material). After the lesson a few students stayed to ask questions and then we were off for our 2 hour lunch! Since I have 3 sections of the same class I will be doing the same lesson again this afternoon; it will be interesting to see how it goes with a different group of students. Anywho, back I go to the office!