My third year of teaching, aside from some personal life complications is going SWIMMINGLY. I really am close with my students this year (in all 5 classes!) and we've already seen so much improvement in terms of grades and conceptual understanding that make me really excited for this year's round of NYS testing.
I've been trying a lot of fun activities like capstone projects and 360 degree math (which I'll touch on later) to really make students apply the knowledge and math concepts from the textbook and the NYS curriculum to real life. Through both these methods, not only are they developing collaboration skills with their partners and groups, but they're also using their math knowledge in hopefully a meaningful and applicable way.
I'm a firm believer in high expectations and high support, and this year with finally being able to implement those expectations I think I'm seeing great results :)
This year, my students are really the ones that are there for me. While I'm writing a whole post on this later tonight, the "living, laughing and loving" that my NYU professors preached during my senior year that I get from each of them are really making my difficult personal life more tolerable. I don't know where I would be with my students especially since so much of what I've come to be used to in terms of my personal life slowly deteriorated.
I think more than ever I'm pouring my energy into my lesson plans, students, teaching, tutoring and helping my kids prep for entrance exams to selective NYC high schools. I really couldn't be happier with this group of kids and I TRULY love teaching more than I ever have.
I miss my former students though! A lot of them are coming to visit me now and say they're doing much better than they thought they would do in high school because of how much I and the other teachers on my team have inspired them!! Aww!
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