You Know You're a Teacher When...

So I wanted to share something from work that makes me happy.
This is my third year teaching at La Europa (wow, where has the time gone?). I teach all four main high school math subjects: Algebra 1, Geometry, Algebra 2, and Pre-Calculus. For the first year, they had the Pre-Calculus students do an online course. I think they did this because a previous math teacher wasn't very confident in teaching Pre-Calculus, and the online course provided instant feedback on their assignments. Well, it was a real pain to use, actually. There were a few upsides, like the fact that I didn't have any lessons to prepare for that class period, as well as being able to use the class as a prep period when students didn't have any questions. But overall it was a pain. I won't go into all of my complaints against it, but here are a few of the inconveniences it caused:

-When students first come to La Europa, they're not allowed to get on the computer right away, so I would have to print out their assignments and grade them by hand.
-I had a hard time coming up with what to base their grades on, because they would complete 2 huge chapters each term (which they had a hard time getting through) and take a test at the end of each chapter. So, basically, if they did poorly on the test, it totally killed their grade. It took me a little while to figure out what to do as a first year teacher.
-Of course, it was an online class, which meant that the website was frequently down. So I had to print out all of the assignments as a back-up, and then grade them by hand without an answer key. Ugh!

Hopefully, you get the picture. It was not fun.
Now, begin year two. By this time I had perfected the pacing and grading somewhat, so we kept using the online course. But the system was down even more frequently than the previous year. So I decided halfway through the year to get everyone caught up to the same point and then teach them all at once. I didn't have any textbooks, so I used the printouts from the website and gave them copies of the exercises. I had to make answer keys as I went, as well as quizzes, but I felt that the students got a lot more out of the class. However, this was not the solution, either. We needed textbooks!

Well, you know you're a teacher when you get excited about getting new textbooks. I got a class set of 5 (our Pre-Calculus class usually isn't very big, and I had a limited budget, so I figured they could share if the class got bigger than 5 - I currently have 4 students in that class), a teacher's edition textbook (which I found out afterwords is an earlier edition than the student books, and a couple of things are different - oh, well), and several teacher resources.

It was great being able to pick out my own textbooks. Some of the textbooks that we have for my other classes don't match very well with my teaching style, so it was fun being able to pick out books that do. Some of my favorite features are: the vocabulary in each section is both highlighted and in bold, there are several good examples in the text, there are a lot of practice problems, there are ACT/SAT Prep questions in each section, and there are calculator notes in the back of the textbook that give them step-by-step instructions for doing things on their graphing calculators. Plus, in each section there are a few "communicating mathematics" questions that are perfect for their journal entries (for each of my classes this year, I try to come up with a short, meaningful journal assignment to help them think about and understand the concepts that they are learning - and the textbook already has the questions for me!).

Even though the textbooks themselves are great, the teacher resources are definitely my favorite part. I have a Resource Masters booklet for each chapter in the book. Each Resource Master comes with: an alphabetic list of vocabulary for the chapter (that I have them fill out as we go), notes (which will be great for Home Passes, when I have to send the girls home with the work they're going to miss), worksheets (which I use for homework), enrichment worksheets (which are quite challenging and perfect for my honors students), quizzes (yay, I don't have to write them!), and 6 different versions of the chapter test - 3 multiple choice (which I could give out as a study guide) and 3 regular (I use one of these as their test, and then I have others on hand if a student fails the test and needs to take a re-test). These Resource Masters are WONDERFUL and will save me hours of work this year.

I cannot say enough of how much I am enjoying teaching Pre-Calculus this year. It is a completely different experience from the previous two years. It's now my favorite class, and I really look forward to teaching it.
Well, I hope I didn't bore you with the details of what excites me as a teacher. I just felt like sharing.