Experience from Week #5
This week has been full of teaching! From what I remember, I think I taught four different lessons this week. The first lesson was slope fields, which allows you to get a good glimpse of what a function would look like, given its derivative function. Great stuff!! The second lesson was finding the area between two curves. The students liked this lesson, mainly because they already knew a lot about area, so it came pretty easily to them. There was just a couple of changes in the procedure of doing the problems, and those changes were fairly easy to understand. The last two lessons were very similar, and they were in the same notes packet. It was more of like a "Lesson Part 1" and "Lesson Part 2" thing. It was all about rotating the area under a curve around an axis or some other line to make a solid object, and then finding the volume of that object. GREAT stuff here!! I have a slideshow below that shows each page of the notes from those last two days:
Other than the mass amount of teaching that I did, I experienced "checking in" homework, which only involves walking around and making sure everyone at least attempted the assignment (which they did most of the time :D). I also got to answer homework questions and go over AP sample questions with them. They really liked the lessons this week, and I can tell that I may be passing on my enthusiasm to some of them. So glad!!
Mrs. Roda also put me up to a large task: in two years, the AP people are adding a topic to the AP Calculus AB test, the test that Mrs. Roda prepares her students for. This topic is L'hopital's Rule, which I learned at MMSTC quite a while ago. Mrs. Roda is going to have me create a lesson plan and a worksheet for the students. She will test out the topic next year, and start using it regularly in the years following. L'hopital's Rule is a LOT of fun, cannot wait to make the lesson plan!!
Mrs. Roda also put me up to a large task: in two years, the AP people are adding a topic to the AP Calculus AB test, the test that Mrs. Roda prepares her students for. This topic is L'hopital's Rule, which I learned at MMSTC quite a while ago. Mrs. Roda is going to have me create a lesson plan and a worksheet for the students. She will test out the topic next year, and start using it regularly in the years following. L'hopital's Rule is a LOT of fun, cannot wait to make the lesson plan!!
Environment
The prompt for this week had me take a picture of the environment of the job. Below is a panoramic picture of the desk wherein I teach, and the students of fifth hour in the background:
There is absolutely nothing that I would change about the atmosphere, mainly because it is hard to change that, in any classroom. I do feel, however, that writing notes on the board, rather than on the projector, is much more fun. I am following Mrs. Roda's style of notes, just so that the students feel more comfortable. When I am a teacher, I will most likely put the notes on the board. Other than that, the room that I work in is just your typical everyday mathematics classroom, which is exactly what I would look for! :)