Back-to-School Night

I hate back-to-school night for a few reasons:
(1) It ends so late considering I get to school shortly after 6am and do not leave until 9:30pm that day. Not only is that day exhausting, but the following day is exhausting too.
(2) 8 minutes is just not enough time to explain the course to the families that come.

But, I do love getting to meet the parents that do attend!

For my resource classes (in which I usually have very few families join me), I have another PowerPoint (similar to my Day 1 presentation) for the parents that highlights the information I want to talk about.

I also have a hand-out for them to take home because I know (from having gone to these nights for my younger brother) that they will not remember most of what I say by the time they get home and unwind.

And, as a very small token of my appreciation for them taking the time to come meet their students' teachers, I leave them with a tiny (and cheesy) gift.

The back of the card is actually useful and contains my email address and school phone extension. 

For my co-taught classes, my co-teacher typically runs the show with me as a friendly face next to him. I do pipe in when he forgets important things (like to point out our contact information on the board). For these classes, we just have a hand-out very similar to the course outline we give out on the first day. Actually, it is the same paper. We just run the copies off again.

And that's the end of the exhausting night! Thankfully Back-to-School Night is Thursday night, so there is only one school day to be exhausted before I can hopefully recuperate over my birthday weekend. :)

Fun fact: My first year, Back-to-School night was actually on my birthday! boo.

Hopefully this weekend I will get around to blogging about the beginning of our first unit... and snap some pictures of our first INB pages! I LOVE our INBs so far. I am SO glad I did not decide to ditch them this year even though we are 1-1 with Chromebooks. My students benefit from hand-written notes and modeling (not me policing their youtube/facebook/twitter/tumblr usage while pretending to do work!).

2 days down, 178 to go!

The rosters for my co-taught CP classes are continually changing so we are starting "actual" math lessons on Monday. My resource rosters usually do not change too much, so we had some fun the past two days. You can check out my plans in a previous post - as usual, I wanted to do too much and it just did not fit.

I have two highlights, both of which occurred Friday:

(1) My period 4/5 class completed Five Easy Pieces and it was WONDERFUL. I loved them talking in groups and actually completing the activity. One girl remarked "I know there's variables and stuff, but this doesn't feel like math class. It's fun." WIN!

(2) I asked my students to complete a short welcome survey (by Monday, so I am still missing many of them). One of my students, who I heard horror stories about, had a really successful two days AND he completed his survey AND he mentioned in it that he wants to go to Fordham and be a photographer. HE HAS A GOAL. That gives us something to work toward, especially if he does start acting like the student he was last year. But so far so good.

Other than that, I already feel behind. I have no lesson plans written for next week yet. I have not even sent an email home to all the parents introducing myself and our class yet. That's all on this weekend's agenda! EEK! So much to do - I need another summer to prepare! :)

2 Days of "Professional Development"

Of course the hottest week of the entire summer is our first week back at the hot-box (I mean school). We have two days of so-called professional development before the students arrive.

Today was filled with meetings. Filled. Tomorrow morning is relatively free, then another 3-hour meeting in the afternoon. I'm looking forward to only having to get my staff photo taken in the morning and then getting some time to plan some of our CP courses with my co-teacher. I have my resource classes set to go for Thursday!