School Exploration

For 1st period, I sat with Dan and Erin who were discussing the new plan for exhibition. Their battery projects won't be done in time for exhibition which is next Thrusday, so they decided to display their graph-it art projects and then collect research on a linear relationship such as shoe size and height to graph. There are multiple lessons that Dan teaches along with the battery project and he wouldn't have time to teach the necessary concepts for the students to fully understand how their project works and if you try to rush them, they get stressed and just want the answers to how to make their project work which defeats the whole purpose. Then the three of us started talking about all the cool projects and Dan explained that his major teaching goal was to make math and science interesting. He said he plans his lessons by assessing if the activity will turn the kids off to math/science or keep them turned on. What a great goal. While we were talking, Mrs. Strong came in a little stressed. She had given a quiz over percents yesterday and she felt that she left more students behind than usual. She was going a little faster to try to get them more prepared for the STAR test in a week. Dan reassured her that she shouldn't worry about the test. "Just think, do we want them to learn it or perform well on some test," Dan said. He told her to just slow down and let the high students move on through independent discovery on an internet math site and provide review for the rest. The rest of the day was standard with little excitement.