Blogging Experience

At first, I did not believe that I would find any intersted or useful information from blogging. The truth is that I have learned a lot of useful information from blogging. Others provided me with great ideas and many resources such as websites and books that I did not know existed. Hearing from the experience of other first year teachers has been especially rewarding and useful as well as getting advice from seasoned teachers. I hope to keep this up for the rest of my career and look forward to the next informative blog post/comment. Any others have reactions to their blogging experiences?

Advice for Beginning Teachers

This post can serve as a place to write any useful advice for first beginning teachers. When I asked Steve Sibol, the JMAP.org editor and publisher, about what advice he might have for first year teachers he mentioned a few key items. He said that our second year will be a lot better than our first, to grade and return as much of our students’ work as possible, and to contribute as much as we can afford to our TDA. Also, he said to get as much work done as possible while at school – don’t take work home. Anyone else have any other good advice?

What Topics are Most Important?

With the regents and June just around the corner, I though it would be useful to start a post on the most important/least important topics in Integrated Algebra. Even though all the topics are important, depending on the amount of time that is left it may be necessary to omit some of the less important topics to ensure an adequate amount of time is spent on the topics that are the most important. The strategy that I have been using is to look at jmap.org. Since I'm using the Pearson Integrated Algebra textbook and jmap breaks down the regents questions into the corresponding chapters and topics of this textbook, I can look at which chapters and sections have been covered the most on the regents exam because they will have the most past regents questions listed. I skipped some topics altogether because I realized that they had no corresponding past regents questions which prompted me to check the standards and realize those topics are not required until Algebra 2/Trig. I'll get back with the exact topics I'm talking about but I know completing the square, the quadratic formula and using the discriminant will not be covered. Just be careful when you look at the number of past regents questions next to each topic because although some may show only a small number of past questions they may be all part III's and IV's and would be worth more points than the part I multiple choice. I will try to compose a list of the topics from the Pearson book that could be on the regents and I'll try to list them in order based on their importance. Please help with ideas and/or comments! Thanks and have a great one.

Regents Exam Preparation

I am a first year 9th grade Integrated Algebra math teacher. With the regents coming up in a few months I've began to think about how I want to review. Any suggestions? I plan on using a lot of the resources on jmap.org which has all of the exams and breaks them down into many useful categories. For instance, since I'm using the Pearson Prentice Hall Integrated Algebra textbook, jmap actually breaks the regents questions down into the corresponding chapter and section of the textbook. I know it does this for Amsco as well.