Aim to Be Awesome, Not Perfect

So I have been thinking about the first week of school.  Here is my plan (unless my administration has different ideas). Day 1 - I want my students to get to know me and I get to know them.  They are going to get a lot of info on the first day, so I figured we would wait until day 2 for more of my info. We are going to make posters like these . Middle School Math Rules is an amazing blog and I love reading her ideas!  Each class will have a different color of post-it and I am going to have these 4 prompts.  Our classroom should be ___________ everday. Math is important because _______. Mrs. Wassmuth can be most helpful by ________.  This will be my best year of math because _________. Their 'warm-up' will be filling out their post-it notes. Day 2 - I want my students to get to know my expectations. I talk a lot of respect (and it is expected) in my classroom, but there really isn't anything in my guidelines or on my walls to remind student...

For me (and for most teachers), summer break is a double-edged sword.  On one side, I need time to organize my house, catch up on my fun reading list, and watch too much HGTV.  On the other side, this is the time for professional development, reading educational material, and gathering ideas to make next year amazing.  Since my last two blog posts have been about the educational side, I thought I should share some of my summer fun. Summer started fast! We spent our first weekend of summer camping with our friends. Soon after we returned home from our fun weekend with our friends, Jason and I headed to New York City for our 15th wedding anniversary.  We walked A LOT.  We got to see a taping of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, "A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder" and "Act of God" with Jim Parsons.    We didn't make it to the Empire State Building, but we found a great place called the Press Lounge that had amazing skyline and river...

I can across this pin - And I think this covers what I want on my walls.  I found this version of it as well, but I don't think I have enough wall space. Sarah Hagan at Math = Love has great ideas.  I love the idea of a fixed/growth quiz at the beginning of the school year - I found the idea here.   I think that is what I am going to do the first or second day of school.  I also like her A/B/not yet grading scale - but I don't know if that will fly in my school and our grading policy. Maybe this is something I can do with our formative assessments...