I need to learn 90 names!

My first full week as a real- all grown up- teacher has come and gone! And I have to say- it was exhausting! It was quite the first week! On Monday and Tuesday the students spent their day either going on a trip (a scavenger hunt for freshmen, an obstacle course for sophomores and a college visit for juniors) or taking diagnostic testing. So on Monday I spent my day proctoring exams and setting up my new computer! It's a Dell Tablet, I really like it. It has a swivel and touch screen. I'm not sure how or when I will make use of those features, but they're pretty nifty nonetheless. On Tuesday I went on a scavenger hunt adventure with my advisory! We were given a digital camera and a list of pictures we had to try to take. We ran around Soho for about two hours in attempts to take as many pictures as we could: a picture of the whole team with a horse, a picture of a team mate with a milk mustache, a picture with the whole team under water, a picture of a team member taking candy from a baby ( I thought that one was a bit over the line), a picture of the whole team with the statue of liberty (this one is featured below) and lots others. I was with my group of advisees running around like crazy- I have to say it was quite the experience- soho with 10 14 year olds.

Wednesday was technically the first day of classes but since my school focuses on an individual course program for each and every student- and we follow block scheduling ( which means that each class does not meet every day, so each day's schedule is different), the scheduling process is very very complicated. Even though the school has yet to grow to a full four year school ( we only have freshmen, sophomores and juniors this year), scheduling 320 students is a very difficult process. The school uses some sort of scheduling software program that is supposed to make the entire process worry free- but of course, it didn't work for all of the students. Therefore most of the students- at least most of the freshmen- didn't have complete schedules on Wednesday. Some of them didn't have enough credits- some had two math classes, some had lunch first period, or no lunch at all! Needless to say- there was still a lot of work to be done on the student schedules.

In my math classes on Wednesday we read through the class syllabus and played a little game. I told the students about quantagories and we solved some of the puzzles for a while. An example of a quantagory is 24 H in a D. Do you know what the H and the D stand for? Give up? It's 24 Hours in a Day. Here are some more puzzles if you want to play around with them!

1. 6 O in a BI
2. 3 W on a T
3. 5 T on a F
4. 13 S on the USF
5. 52 C in a D
6. 3 BMSHTR
7. 88 K on a P
8. 9 L of a C
9. 100 C in a D
   

It's a fun little game- not completely math related, but not totally void of any logical reasoning.

On Thursday and Friday depending on if I'd seen that class or not, we played around with The Four Numbers Game- the topic of my senior exercise at Kenyon and played some more math games online. I wanted to show the students how to access the online course system we use and how they will use it for math, but unfortunately the freshmen don't yet have access to the system. This is particularly annoying to me- if they can't get online then I have to print out a copy of the homework for each and every one of them (90 kids!).

So the combination of the incomplete and wrong schedules with the lack of system access left me very frustrated. I'm sure it will all be worked out by the end of this week- but it is still frustrating now. But tomorrow should be better- I'm planning on teaching my first real lesson! Fingers crossed it goes well- the topic is data and data tables. Woohooo!

Here the picture of me with my advisory with the statue of liberty. Aren't they cute!?