Spoiler: I do not have a textbook for my resource level courses.

Spoiler Alert: I do not have a textbook for my resource level (special education) Algebra 2 courses. Why? "It's not in the budget this year." (or any subsequent year apparently).

This is both a positive and a negative for me. It's a positive because I actually like making my own materials. It's a negative when I have a parent like last year who insists on having material at home (in advance) so that he can try to work with the child. While I would much rather have 12 overly concerned parents than the nonexistent ones (which is what I typically find for my resource level classes), last year I had nothing pre-made as far in advance as he would have preferred. This led to a multitude of issues and headaches for me throughout the year... in just dealing with that one parent.

So, I vowed to myself that this summer I would get ahead making guided notes so that I can have them posted in advance in my Google Site. My curriculum has 11 units; I have created guided notes for 5 of those units. That is some definite progress!

This allows me to post the guided notes early as an outline, but because I still do not have a textbook per say, gives me the flexibility to change them throughout the year if need be. I am not bound to a bound book, so to speak.

I pull examples for these guided notes from a variety of places: our old college-prep level textbook, our new college-prep level textbook, a plethora of workbooks I have acquired in just a few short years, and my brain. I have my special education course organized following the same curriculum as the college-prep general education course (by law), but I have the flexibility to tailor the instruction to fit my students' needs. For example, while we will cover logarithms every year, we may not go AS in depth as the regular level class, because we have to spend more time on reviewing the fundamentals of algebra in the beginning of the year. I can set the pace for the course; I am not bound to the pacing calendar the way we are in my co-taught regular level course.

I can't tell you how many years I have started to blog in late summer and then stopped as soon as school started. The next summer I would go through and delete most of those posts and say "Hey, I'm starting over!". This year, I actually want to continue to blog throughout the school year.

I know very few people follow this blog now... and probably very few will in the future. That's okay. It is more a place for me to consciously think about aspects of my classroom and my teaching. If I blog about it, I will think about it more. Reflection is key. This forces me to do just that!