Parent Teacher Night 11-20

The first parent-teacher conference of the school year went (unsurprisingly) well!! I have been collecting a decent amount of test scores, important homeworks and classwork to show parents. This has been very helpful in addition to having Skedula handy. My biggest takeaways:

A) A decent (50%?) of parents showed up. This says a lot about their support and that they care for their children. I was happy to be able to see so many parents and discuss student progress and next steps.

B) Many of the students talk positively about me outside of school and a decent amount have commented that this is their favorite class. Great! This was a delight to hear, especially for the students who have had a difficult time with math in elementary school. Some of them have commented that now, they get it. I think this is a big thanks to visual models and trying my best to get students to feel safe enough to ask questions when they don't understand a concept.

C) Tokens are a big motivator and plenty of students talk about them outside of school or have shared how it works with their parents.

D) There is such a difference between Common Core and how parents (and even me) were taught math, so sometimes, there is little support at home for homework if a student is struggling. Parents are trying their best. I am not quite sure about what to do here.

MY next steps:

A) Find a way to balance homework. While I think it's okay to not give homework if students haven't fully understood the lesson (or we didn't get to complete the lesson for that day), that doesn't mean that they can't practice what they DO know. There should be some kind of backup homework or practice in case we don't finish the lesson for that day.

B) There should be some more signs around the room. Perhaps this can be done Wednesday?

Overall, it was a great experience. The next few units are not difficult compared to proportions and number sense. We will be done with number sense by the end of next week (or in two weeks depending on progress). We will finally move on to integers and we'll get to use our real-life coordinate plane!