It’s the end of the quarter, and I admittedly did not do a very good job of preparing myself mentally for what was to come today. I knew it was going to be a short period (65 minutes instead of our usual 75 minutes). It wasn’t until I was chatting with another teacher did I realize it was…position graph day. This meant that we were going to need an insane amount of post-its. I’m grateful that the team ordered the post-its beforehand. I just needed to cut them so that so that they would fit on our whiteboards.
With Block 5, I cancelled the Quick Quiz first to save 10 minutes. First, we had the students draw the position line, but with the positive arrow facing left. Then we had them do the motion maps with delta-t at 2s, 1s, and 0.5s. THEN we did the 90-degree rotation of the graph. I’m proud to say that the students all did it, with minimal post-its falling off. I think it went much easier because they all had the same data. So when the students looked around and saw that their boards didn’t look like the others, they received immediate feedback that theirs wasn’t going well.
The slopes came out pretty well. The discussion towards what does the slope represent was perfect. The students were able to hit it out of the park. It definitely helped that they also covered slope-intercept form in Algebra last week. I think this year, the students were able to identify what y, m, x, and b all represent on a position graph in the quickest ever.
I’m not sure if I prefaced it to the students that I despise post-it day. They were all on excellent behavior—which resulted in a class full of students on task and asking genuine questions to gain a better understanding.
After teaching today, I ran into Mrs. F and we both agreed this is one of the hardest teaching days. Now, we’re thinking of getting shirts made for us to wear.
Learning with Ms. Medrano 