Practicum Experiences

For my first lesson I wanted to make a "fun" and memorable class for the students.  I designed a human model of how to distribute a monomial into a polynomial.  Before the class I got signs, whiteboards and wrote out a narrative of the math story I would tell while the students acted it out.  I was nervous that students wouldn't volunteer or that they would think it was lame, but when I announced my idea a few students actually gasped with excitement.  It was a bit disorganized (my FA referred to it as "organized chaos") but overall a really fun activity that engaged the students in a way notes aren't able to.  After my lesson my FA told me how happy he was to see that I did something different and interesting in a math class and really encouraged me to keep trying out ideas like that.

My second experience that I wrote in my notebook I don't want to put on my blog for various reasons.  Suffice it to say I learned a lot about the kind of teacher I don't want to be.