A Day in the Life...a few days late

When I saw last week's "A Day in the Life" blogging challenge, I was prepared. I took careful notes of my day last Monday, then got so busy with the "days in the life" of the rest of the week that I never got around to blogging. Oops. Here you are, a little late:

A Day in the Life of Sarah on a Monday

         5 a.m. Alarm goes off. I get up, bundle up, and squeeze in a quick 5k length run.

         7:10 a.m. I should be heading out the front door, but I took too long picking out an outfit. In the words of the great Liz Lemon, blurgh.

         7:17 a.m. I actually am heading out the front door.

         7:44 a.m. I arrive to school. On my drive in I've been thinking about the quiz I need to create for beginning polynomials for my sophomores, so I'm going to try to start that before our morning staff meeting.

         7:52 a.m. I comb through my binders of old curriculum to help inform the quiz. While combing I also realize that my binders are a bit of a mess and add that project to my to-do list.

         8:00-8:20 a.m. Our morning staff meeting. We plan for schedules, talk about kids who are struggling, learn of a potential new student, and I successfully convince our program director to order a BreakoutEDU kit with the program budget.

         8:21 a.m. I order the BreakoutEDU kit. Yay!

         8:27 a.m. I give up on finding a good quiz that I created in the past. Make new quiz until 8:51.

         8:55-9:11 a.m. Make all of the photocopies.

         9:15-9:40 a.m. My statistics students are doing a variation experiment on the Stroop Test looking at if conflicting stimuli cause people's response times to increase, and whether it increases more based on whether the response is oral, written, or physical clicking online. I organize and gather information from various students so that we can start conducting the experiment today. 

         9:45 - 10:15 a.m. Create alumni survey for dispersion online to inform our large-scale program planning.

         10:16 a.m. Refill water bottle for the second time. Hooray hydration!

         10:40 a.m. My freshmen arrive for class. Two-thirds are present. Sounds dramatic, but I have three students, so my two most consistent are here. We explore what other information we would need given two pieces (sides or angles) in order to perfectly match a given triangle. They independently determine the four triangle congruence postulates by the end of class. We have a conversation about why ASS doesn't always work, and my boss walks by my classroom while ASS is written very large on my board. Good thing he trusts me!

          11:30 a.m. My juniors come in whining about how tired they are and how they hate Mondays. We start our exploration into graphing polynomials from factored form by looking at multiplicities of roots patterns and what they look like on a graph.

          11:42 a.m. I regret my second water bottle. It's a loooooong time until I can pee.

          12:20 p.m. Sweet relief! It's lunchtime, so of course no students are in the bathroom. After relieving myself I eat my same lunch I eat every day: turkey sandwich, apple, water. 

          1:04 p.m. While continuing our multiplying polynomials scavenger hunt from the previous week, one student asks "Is this going to be an IEPeagle claw?" This is her own term for the visual pattern created by distributing between a binomial and a trinomial when multiplying them together. Something like this: 

Note: I teach in a Special Ed program, so my kids all have IEPs. They know they're documents that help kids like them learn the same as students without similar emotional and/or learning issues. Her comment, including IEP in her "eagle claw" distribution pattern, identifies the problem as unique, and is not meant to be disparaging at all.

           1:32 p.m. The same student comes across a trinomial multiplied by another trinomial and decides that she'll call this a "Super IEPeagle claw." 

           1:59 p.m. Kids in study skills ask about the Powerball Odds. I briefly explain how combinations work.

           2:15 p.m. Walk between study skills rooms looking for kids who are "working" but actually flipping screens and help students having a hard time getting started pick something to work on productively. 

           2:20 - 2:50 p.m. Boring administrative stuff. Do my attendance, grades, points.

           3 - 3:30 p.m. Host "homework cafe" for students who need a quiet space still at school to get their work done. We eat, we work, I pester my most faithful attendee to actually read the articles he claims to be using for research instead of just gathering them.

          3:45 p.m. Head for home. Relax, eat, prepare for tomorrow!