Pink Pens and Projectors

Today was a fantastic day.  The 10th graders had a quiz on multiplying and dividing polynomials, and grading them was really rewarding...most of my students got As (one even got 105), and the two that didn't do well at all just made really silly mistakes (something I have to work on them with).

I had "one on one" meetings with my students today, which actually went amazingly.  Had a great talk with this one girl who always comes in looking really angry and sits and writes her name all over her notebook with her multi-colored sharpies while I'm talking.  I've never seen her smile that much...I'm hoping that means I got through to her!  Another girl told me that resource room was a lot different this year: "kids are not out of control crazy and they don't curse at you and we actually do work instead of just hang out."

During the dreaded 7th period, my supervisor was observing, and we worked on changing out "rules" into "norms" (taking the rules they came up with the first day like no sleeping and no cursing and making them positive like learn actively and use appropriate language).  They got into that about 10 times more than I thought they would--I pretty much expected them to refuse to do it.  When my supervisor left, they wouldn't stop talking about how she winked at JT as she left, and when they found out she was my boss JT tried to run after her to make sure she would "give me a good grade."

Other great things that happened, that I would not have understood the importance of two weeks ago...

• The copy machine finally works!!! 
• I found the pink pen that I like to use to comment on student work...I thought I lost it!
• We got a screen and a projector in our room (pretty old school compared to the SmartBoards that every other classroom has, but better than nothing!)  Just in time for me to be able to do a lesson on analyzing photography tomorrow...I've been finding it surprisingly easy to incorporate art into my lessons.