3.24.12- late late late

I couldn't sleep so I'm working on lesson plans. I keep hoping that we will get to see everything we need to by the time the test is here. Some days I feel like we won't, others I think we are ok. The class I'm worried about is the juniors. They've been tough to teach this year and while you know they want to pass the first time, you can get the feeling they also don't want to work at all. Very frustrating. I think they want to me put a boot in their butts, when I do though, they whine and complain and are slow to do the work. I want to smack certain ones for being this way and I want to smack myself for letting them.
I hope my freshmen do all right. They are starting to gain confidence but aren't consistent. Maybe with our journaling, they will start to gain that confidence. Already I can tell where they've grown but they don't believe me when I tell them. It will be ok.
In the meantime, it's coming up on contract time. Big changes on the horizon and I don't know if its just a teacher thing or if it will be more than that. I've had many thoughts cross my mind about the future and I can't figure out what would be the best though. Too many factors. Guess we will see what events transpire and react accordingly. Time to get sleep. Lates.

3.22.13 - where did you go

Here are pictures of some note booking we have done lately. I'll update this post later since I already wrote out a description and then I accidentally deleted it all. Argh. I shouldn't post from my phone. Anyway, more to come from Algebra 1.

*Update*
The first 4 pics are showing the different symbolic representations of quadratics. I made booklets we could paste in our journals and we took a page per problem. The last page we had our homework on the left side.

The remaining pics are from solving quadratics - showing factoring, graphs and tables. This time we created a foldout to paste in our books. I had them use graph paper so they could draw their graphs with ease for examples but the note section was done on the notebook page.

This is being done at the request of my students. They've enjoyed the days we journal and wanted to do more. Luck would have it, the printer was on the fritz and thus we did our work in our journals. More to come as we continue our unit. Just one more month till our big test. Hope we get things tied together so they do well.
More to come! Lates.