First Day of School: Failure?

Today was the first day that I got the chance to teach. I had my teacher voice, my teacher outfit, my lesson plan, and an activity to make math concepts more visual to students. My objective? Students will be able to do subtraction with regrouping (not across a zero). On the diagnostic, only one child mastered this objective out of 12. The one ELL kid who reads at a preschool level.

The start of the class was fine. The kids were tired after 100 minutes of reading, so we took a "brain break" (For those that will understand -- tomorrow, we will bacon sizzle) to get ready to switch to math. I started off with an example that I walked through, checking at each step for volunteers. I had several of the same volunteers over and over. Several people were NOT in a good mood after reading. I knew one student had been taken out of the classroom and brought back in time for math with me.

My class time was split oddly so that I had 20 minutes before lunch and 20 minutes after, which included the transition time in the hallway. While I initially though this would be a huge problem, it ended up being a bit of a god-send.

The Block Debacle

Since my lesson plan involved teaching with base-10 blocks, I thought I would introduce them before lunch and continue afterward. My class had been pretty good with directions (aside from some shouting out) until we got to the blocks. Each table had a set in their table bucket and while some kids had noticed them earlier, most of them did not until I said the disastrous phrase.

"Ok class. Today, we're going to use blocks to --"

I barely got past that line before kids had opened up the neat ziploc packages and dumped them all over the table. I tried to stop them, to get out my directions, but the fact that these were blocks AND they stacked together was like giving kids Legos. One table managed to somewhat follow directions, but you'd have thought that the other kids were at home in their rooms with the blocks making big castles and fortresses. Unfortunately, this meant that the kids who were trying to listen at those tables couldn't pay attention. This went on for longer than I care to admit to in a quantitative assessment.

And here's where the teacher voice came in. In summary, I said --

"Class, it is clear that we are not ready to work with blocks today. When we get back from lunch, there will be no blocks on the table for anyone."

I went on to include stuff about taking other peoples learning time, but I think they just shut off after I said no more blocks. A few people were rowdy on the way to lunch, and on the way back was worse. I soon discovered that one student had not been given her meds that morning for what I'm guessing is ADHD. We'd gotten a new student that morning that no one had seen before and sat him in what has to be the worst spot for him in the entire room.

For the second half of the class, I had the one good table try to model what we were doing. That worked somewhat better, but from now on I think I'm going to pass at the blocks.

The most frustrating part was that my assessment was too long and complicated for most of these kids. The ELL student got it all right, but then again she was the only one in the class who had gotten it on the diagnostic. I did notice some patterns in they're work, and it's such basic subtraction things that it almost made me cry. How on Earth was I supposed to teach regrouping if you can't even subtract 5-3?

But I keep telling myself that tomorrow will be better. Tomorrow's topic is similar, so we can do some review.

But NO BLOCKS.