About this Blog
tales of a Philly math teacher
Donate Now
Yesterday my principal came and observed me for a full class period, and it went reasonably well. I was way stressed out about it the day before, and especially because I was still sitting on a half-baked, crappy lesson plan. But I pulled it together in the end and the boys were absolute angels. They froze when he came in and sat in silence and participated for the most part. Heck, I kinda wish my principal sat in the back of the room all of the time.
I’m having my debrief session on Monday, so I’ll get some more feedback then, but for the…
Those of you who’ve been following closely may have picked up on the fact that I am less that satisfied with my life right now. No surprise here, of course, as a first year teacher knee-deep in the mid-November blues. But the question that’s been bugging me is, why? Why is it that even though…
read more »On my worst days, or certainly the most exhausting ones, I find myself drifting back to thoughts about all the other things I could be doing with my life right now. Namely, an architecture student in grad school. These are dangerous, slippery slopes for my mind to follow. For example, last weekend my first Penn…
read more »My school has Saturday school every two weeks. And yes, a lot of kids actually come. They complain a lot about it, but the fact remains that somewhere deep down inside they’d rather be somewhere, anywhere, than at home. I was able to make some pretty good connections with the kids today. I kept it…
read more »The interesting thing about my 11th graders is that they are better (relatively speaking, of course) at high school math than they are at middle school math. Having been at my school for two years, they can get by with basic algebra and geometry, since they’ve been taught that here by a more than competent…
read more »Day 1: Success! I have about 110 boys that I teach, most of whom are great guys and who came in ready to learn and talk about the diffrent changes my school has implemented in the past year (new principal, new faculty, new SMART boards and technology, new student conduct systems, etc.). The kids took…
read more »After a month of PD, meetings, classroom set up, curriculum planning, and talking about these kids, I’m finally going to be in the classroom and meeting my kids today for the first time. We’ve had some scheduling issues in the past few days that will still need to be ironed out, so today may be…
read more »Yes, I’ve been bad about blogging. Institute was a whirlwind that pretty much took everything out of me. But with the school year approaching, and having settled (somewhat) into my apartment in West Philly, I’m going to pick this back up. Thankfully, my charter school has its stuff together in all the ways that my…
read more »I’d like everyone to know that I’m still alive and well, despite the complete breaking down of my blogging habits. Needless to say, I continue to meet great new corps members and I’m having a good time, but I’ve entered the classroom and lesson planning is completely taking over my life. I wish I could…
read more »The joy ride is over. Buckle your seat belts, everyone, the road just got a lot bumpier. We delved into the first steps to creating our very own lesson plans today. Philadelphia Institute provides something called the Institute Summer Achievement Toolkit (ISAT) which lists a bunch of lesson objectives for each class taught this summer…
read more »
Teach For Us thanks our national sponsor for its generous support
