We had an Act 80 day on Monday I forgot to mention. Interesting day actually. We basically looked at all the 4-Sight testing data from the past 2 years. Its obviously new to our district and we're trying to gather information about the students and this Act 80 was reserved strictly for incorporating the analyzed data into our own personal curriculum. I didn't have a difficult time trying to decide what our students needed help on or how I was going to incorporate it into my curriculum, it was how I was going to carry out the process. I saw we had issues in the open ended questions in math, therefore, I wanted to give a problem such as: Measure the area of a basketball court. What percentage of the court is covered by the keys on the court?
Here's the problem, the open ended question just turned into a geometry, algebraic functions, measurement, etc. etc. etc. problem. So, the one day lesson I was going to try to incorporate, turned into about a 4 day lesson. I talked to some of the math teachers and they said, unfortunately, the kids are not retaining lessons previously taught, whether the day before, the week before, or the year before. Therefore, without given formulas to use whenever necessary, they often find themselves stuck on a problem. Which, proved true when I did my heart rate lesson last year. It was just trying to teach heart rate, I found myself having first to teach simple functions like "foil" and such.
Are we expecting less out of our students and lowering our standards? I don't know. . .
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I know what you mean. I teach the basic things year to year, such as health related fitness components, bones and muscles, and how to find and take your heart rate. Unfortunately, they forget every year and I need to go back and start over again. I know I expect a lot out of my students, but that is not always the case in other classes. I think that if the science teacher or math teacher doesn't stress the importance of something and how it can be incoporated into everyday life, the students just feel it is useless inforamtion.
Post a Comment