This week at Gloucester High School was different from the others. When I first began going to the school, I spent most if not all of my time in my AT’s classroom. I really enjoyed those experiences as I found I was really able to connect with the students. This week, and some of last week, I spent a lot more time outside of those math classes. I have been lucky enough to continue attending the afternoon 11/12 workplace math class in the afternoons. The last two weeks we have focused on building casino style games that can be transformed from being fair to being in the casino’s favor depending on the amount of money able to be won. We then moved on to look more closely at describing and finding mean and medians of a group of numbers. Some students struggled with these concepts, but most of them were very intrigued throughout the lesson. It was wonderful to see the students to be so engaged. There were a few who would race to the board to share their answers with the rest of the class. It was great because the students were able to explore different number patters that would give specific means or medians (ex. give a list of 5 numbers whose mean is 80 and whose median is 75). The students were able to come up with their own combinations and really teach themselves how to manipulate numbers to give desired results. In all, I found the classes to be very insightful and fun!
For the mornings, I have been meeting up with my fellow teacher candidates to discuss our CSL project in more detail. It has been so wonderful to actually come up with solid ideas that we know we can realistically implement over the next year. I also like that we’ve all decided to work on all the projects together. I already feel a greater sense of community between us. We’ve decided to call ourselves the CBC – or community building coalition. As cheesy as it sounds, I think the name really contributes to our cause and allows students the opportunity to better understand why we are in the schools and how they can help. Many times when I think about going to the school, I feel overwhelmed. I think I’m slowly coming to realize how much work is required from us in the next coming weeks, so it’s easy to freak myself out. That being said, I can’t wait to begin the projects through our school. As of right now, we have 4 projects in the works. The first is Link promotion. We were actually able to go talk to the Link Crew class and begin our work for this project. The Link crew is a group of grade 12 students that plan events and work closely with grade 9 students to help with their schooling experience while building inter-grade connections. Our goal with this group is to work closely with their advertising committee to create social media platforms that allows the students to better communicate amongst each other while building and strengthening community digital citizenship. This platform will give students an opportunity to become better informed about the awesome work that the Link crew does in their school community. We hope that this project will also allow younger students to become aware and join the Link crew when they are able to. In the next coming weeks, we hope to begin a skateboarding club (with focus on all aspects of skateboarding including riding, art, graphic design, photography – just to name a few), a greenhouse project where we work with students to refurbish the run down green house, providing the community with the first steps to a community0based garden center, and to promote SPARK, a program focusing on providing fitness to students before Math, Science or English classes to help with concentration and academic success. I can’t wait to begin working more intensively on these projects as I have no doubt they will help further build a tight-knit community within the school. I also will be attending the coffee house and a Halloween Haunted House in the coming weeks. I feel so fortunate to have been invited to participate in previously established community events. I hope these opportunities will allow for me to meet more people and get to know the school even better!
1 Comment
Linda Radford
10/23/2015 10:29:42 pm
Wow Nicole, It sounds like the urban ed group at Gloucester is moving forward quickly on a number of great projects. Thanks for sharing such exciting news.
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