Field Blog: Week 2

For my second visit to HB I sat in the Statistics/Pre-Calculus class for the second time. They were doing transformations of graphs, one of my favorite lessons in math. The teacher had a really interesting activity where the girls had to transform a standard graph to one that matched the curve of a water fountain. They took turns going up to the smart board and doing this with a graphing program through the smart board. They seemed to really enjoy it and  I thought this was a good way to visually teach the lesson and use technology in the classroom. I found this  After they did this as an intro to the lesson they worked with notes sheets that were provided by the teacher. I remembered from my high school experience that I did better in classes that had note sheets provided by the teacher that we filled out as class progressed because it clarified what we needed to know. The teacher had a copy to give to me which I found very helpful because I was able to see how he went about teaching the lesson. The next class I went to was an Algebra 2 Honors class. This teacher taught using the Smart Board and what looked to be a PowerPoint presentation. I could only begin to imagine the planning for each lesson he had to do for each class. One observation I had was that all the students had the TI-Nspire calculator. I thought it was good that they all had the same one as the teacher so there was no confusion when they had to do certain parts of the problems on their calculators. This teacher taught much differently than the one in the previous class. This teachers way of teaching included more discussion amongst the class and rather than just writing the problem down and solving it, he asked the class how each problem should be solved. I thought this was really good because the girls weren't just writing what he was saying, but they were talking about it. I think learning through discussion is one of the best ways to learn so I liked that the teacher was able to do that, especially with math, which can often times be difficult.