I lived through the first week of teaching 8th grade math! I have devoted all of my reading hours to Saxon 87 Math. I have to ponder every word and phrase that the book offers so that I can go in and relay all the pertinent information to the eleven students. I'm sure some of them are far better at math than I am, however; that is to my advantage because they can learn the new concepts easily. Actually, the great need they have is the language portion of math. While some of them are very good at the mechanics they are lacking in language skills.
The vocabulary totally baffles them. I found that they were all aware of the word "consecutive" but at a loss as to what it means. Consequently, I spend a great amount of my teaching time helping them understand the language. When time to take the tests at the end of the year comes around I'm hoping that the scores will reflect the efforts that they have made to learn the language.
The basic question each and every lesson is,"When are we ever going to use this stuff?" I have my answer ready, " When you get to be my age, someone might ask you to teach them what a subtrahend is and what a minuend is and what is the commutative property of addition and if you pay attention now, you may be able to explain it to them!"
My Literature and Grammar class is such a pleasure! I'm sure that I know more than they do and I thoroughly enjoy sharing my knowledge with them. Teaching them about genres, plot, theme, and all those things is fun. My goal is to internalize all the math concepts so that I can be secure in that area also. The thing is, when am I ever going to use this stuff??
1 comment:
I'm actually anxious to re-learn the math that I should have learned in school (had I been paying attention) when Maureen goes to school. Math seems fun now that I don't have to learn it.
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