Today is the first day of my new long-term subbing assignment. This counts as a special day, and so I'm doing "A Day in the Life" today:
8:00 -- I arrive at my new middle school. Some kindergartners and their parents arrive -- officially, the elementary school is a separate school, but they share the main office and other parts of the campus. It is a phased reopening, where one or two grades restart each day -- kindergarten today and middle school next week.
The office workers and I prepare for my first day of distance learning. We continue attempting to log in to the Canvas website, but I still can't get in. Fortunately, yesterday I spoke to the regular teacher, and he already sent me copies of the lesson via Google Drive so that I at least have enough material today.
I'm shown to my room for the new three-and-a-half months, which isn't far from the main office. I've been given a Chromebook for streaming the class, and there is also a document camera and projector.
8:45 -- It's a Late Start Monday, and so there's a teachers' meeting today. The regular teacher calls me to tell me how to log into the meeting on Google Meet. It is a math department meeting. The head of the department asks sixth, seventh, and eighth graders to discuss the major content standards that they plan on teaching during the upcoming week.
After the meeting, the regular teacher stays on to make sure that I'm connecting everything right. Our goal is to make sure that I use the document camera to display the copies of the lesson that I printed last night, and that the projected image is visible to the Chromebook camera so that students can see it.
9:45 -- First period begins. This is the first of two eighth grade classes.
This blog will focus on the eighth grade class, and so the title of my posts will be the name of the lesson that I'm teaching them. So today's lesson is an introduction to functions and relations.
As I lecture from the notes (that come from APEX, via Canvas), I don't like one of its examples, a table where some values of x are repeated, yet the relation is nevertheless a function because the corresponding values of y are also repeated. Instead, I take a dry erase packet that's already set up for a functions lesson (in reality, it was set up for a demo lesson for a different job interview) and fill in my own relations that are more typical of the examples used to distinguish functions from non-functions.
This might have been a good time to introduce Sarah Carter's DIXI-ROYD mnemonic, except that the words "domain" and "range" (the D and the R) don't appear in the lesson. Otherwise I certainly would have mentioned DIXI-ROYD.
As is common during these Google Classroom lessons, it's hard for me to tell whether the students are actually paying attention or not. Most student cameras are off, and very few of them are speaking.
10:30 -- First period ends and second period begins. This is the first of two seventh grade classes.
These students are learning how to add integers. I tell the students that comfortability with positive and negative numbers is one of the most important lessons learned in seventh grade, as it sets them up for success next year and in high school.
This time, a few students do speak up. Some of them are having trouble finding the lesson on APEX, while others struggle to see exactly what I'm writing under the document camera. This is one of two classes with a co-teacher, and she tries to give them a link (which she posts in the Google Meet chat) to the notes, but it only seems to work for some of them.
11:10 -- Second period ends for a short break.
11:20 -- Third period begins. This is the second seventh grade class.
More students have trouble finding the lesson on APEX. Since my Google Meet chat is still open, I just post the link provided by the co-teacher again.
12:05 -- It's now time for a sort of "tutorial" period, for intervention, support, and extension.
Some students remain from the third period class. And so I continue the seventh grade lesson on integer addition, especially for the sake of those students who aren't able to see the APEX lesson.
I also use tutorial to tell the students one of my resolutions. This time I tell them the third rule:
3. We remember math like riding a bicycle.
If these students want to be successful in the future, then they should remember how to add integers just as easily as remembering how to ride a bike. One student (apparently quoting the regular teacher, since I see it written on a poster in his room) responds in the chat that the brain is like other muscles -- it must be exercised in order to stay strong. This goes along with my general idea.
12:35 -- Tutorial ends, and it's now time for lunch.
1:15 -- Fourth period begins. This is the second eighth grade class.
And unlike the other eighth grade class, but just like the seventh grade classes, there are students who can't access the lesson on APEX. This is the second of two classes with a co-teacher, and once again she provides a link that allows some of the students to see the lesson.
1:55 -- Fourth period ends and fifth period begins. This is the Math Skills class.
I tell the students that this class will be run just as the regular teacher does, where they are expected to log in to sites such as ST Math, Dream Box, or even Khan Academy. But it's impossible for me to tell whether anyone is actually using those sites or not -- and I suspect that this will be a continuing problem with this fifth period class.
2:40 -- Fifth period ends and sixth period begins. This is independent study PE for all students, and thus conference period for all teachers.
During this time, I contact the regular teacher. He tells me that he has, in fact, forgotten to activate the APEX lessons for all classes other than first period. This explains why no one in first period complains about APEX access. Of course, if my Canvas and APEX had been working properly, then I could have activated the lessons myself.
Meanwhile, the workers in the main office notice that my name is misspelled on my new email account (it appears as "Davis" instead of "David"). Originally I was going to wait a few weeks to inquire about this at the district because this is the least of my troubles -- getting Canvas working is much more important than having my name spelled correctly. But we can't rule out the possibility that the name mismatch is the cause of my problems with Canvas.
Whenever I do "A Day in the Life," it should always be followed by reflection. My biggest fear going into today was that I'd have problems with technology -- and indeed I do. But I'd much rather struggle with technology now than when hybrid starts next week and students are in the classroom. Let's hope that my Canvas will finally be working by then.
I decide to look up the stats on how many students are in each of my new classes:
- My largest class is first period, with 32 eighth graders.
- My smallest class is fifth period Math Skills, with sixteen students (with nine of them in the seventh grade). My smallest main math class is second period, with 20 seventh graders.
- In general, the classes with the co-teacher are smaller. This is probably due to their being more special ed students there, hence the need for the co-teacher.
- For hybrid next week, in general last names A-L attend school on Wednesdays/Fridays, while last names M-Z attend school on Tuesdays/Thursdays. Yet I notice a few students with surnames starting with M -- and even N -- in Cohort WF.
- Of my largest first period class of 32 students, 19 are in the Wed./Fri. group. Five of them are opting out of hybrid, leaving fourteen of them in Cohort WF proper. This represents the most students that I will have in the classroom at once during hybrid.
- The fewest number of in-person students I will have is five in Math Skills, with four of them in seventh grade. The smallest in-person cohort in a proper math class is seven, in second period.
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