“Every accomplishment starts with the decision to try.”

It's amazing how many decisions a day a teacher has to make. I'm just starting to understand this concept. Today I had a lesson for math that had 2 things unexpected arise. The first being the promethian board acting up and making weird zig-zag things. First it just zaged upward, then I went to make a 0 and somehow it make a shape of a cat head. It was funny and I had some laughs but I decided to just continue. Then another cat head came out of a 0. With the few other problems it had the students distracted and paying more attention to what the pen was going to do next then the actual lesson. So I decided to stop and give the students 5 seconds to laugh about it, and we all laughed together. Then I said that our laughter was out and we knew that it might happen again, but it was time to focus and ignore the complication. I was a little frustrated with the pen because it made it really difficult to write in the chart that I had created for the math lesson.

I made a mistake by not looking closely at the problems we were going over together. I used the teachers manual and the * looked like an + sign. As you know the picture of the student pages in those things are really small. Well we were working with broken calculator problems and the question was something like t*52 = 3380. The key that was broken was the division key. Once I got to this problem I realized they didn’t have the skills to figure that problem out I wasn’t sure what to do. Luckily my cooperating teacher jumped in and saved the day with calculators! I think this was a decision I should have made on my own knowing that the students could more easily guess and check using them, but it shows how many split second decisions teachers must make. I believe this is something that will come better with time as well as experience. My CT is always giving me awesome advice about lessons in the curriculum because he had already taught them and knew what decisions worked and which ones didn’t.
One of the students in class hadn’t finished his math work from the morning and was pulled out of class to work on it. This particular student is new to the area and had been struggling previously with math. I wasn’t the one to work with him on the math boxes, but knowing the student I would have thought that maybe he didn’t do it because he didn’t understand. Once the student was pulled out he finished them in a short time and had them all correct. I think that it shows that students will surprise you sometimes with what they learn as well as your assumptions about different situations. Instead of the student not really knowing what to do, it was really a matter of him not using his time wisely during the allotted time given to him.