My Classes

Pre-calculus was the first class I took over. It was also the one where the content worried me the most, as I had never taken a pre-calculus class in high school. Many of the things I taught were things that had been taught to me at a higher level in college, so it was an interesting challenge to take what I had learned and teach it to high schoolers. The seniors were very receptive to having a student teacher, and didn’t stress when I had to take a little extra time to explain a concept because I had accidentally started out from a super theoretical point of view.

Sometimes I struggled to engage them, particularly the seniors towards the end of the year. However, I was also able to connect with them - many were headed off to college. I let them know early on that I would always be willing to answer questions about college. This helped me build a deeper connection to them.

My two Algebra 1 classes were made entirely of freshmen, which was totally different than teaching freshmen. I was lucky to have freshmen who weren’t afraid to tell me “Slow down, Miss!” Both classes were fairly quiet, but I was able to get students to participate by encouraging answers both verbally and in the chat. When students returned to in-person learning, it felt like the first day of school. I had been teaching for two months by that point, but I really started to feel like a teacher once I was sitting in front of the kids.

My Algebra 1 classes were where I taught the majority of students with 504s and IEPs, as well as all of my English language learners. This made making lessons a bit more challenging sometimes - I had to balance differentiated instruction and modifications with high expectations, as well as shifting away from heavily vocabulary-based problems and making sure students had multiple ways to show their work.