My 4th graders were standing in line at the tail end of their bathroom break when a student made the comment that math was boring. I of course, being a teacher, had to stand up for the unpopular subject. I told them that math wasn't boring all the time. Another student, remembering our M&M math from the day before, said, "Yeah, M&Ms make math better. You should give us M&Ms every day!" I told him no, but sometimes having a teacher who was excited about math could make math exciting, or at least less boring. Unfortunately, sometimes it's a struggle for me to get excited about math. And because of my big mouth, my 4th graders were expecting great things from me and my first math lesson.
About two seconds before I started teaching, a vision came to me; we could pretend we were secret agents, trying to find the product of two numbers! Our mission required that we knew how to multiply two digit numbers. Woohoo! How exciting! It actually worked pretty well, considering I was flying by the seat of my pants with this whole idea. I heard one boy whispering to himself, "I'm a secret agent of math," as he did his assignment for the day. Overall the lesson was okay; I know I could've done better, but given that I haven't had a whole lot of experience teaching math, I did pretty well.
Today was kind of sad for me; it was the last day of our body systems unit in science class. But today was a good one to end on; my students were very enthusiastic. They have a review day and a test next week, and then we'll move on to electricity. Sigh. It just won't be the same as learning about our bodies. On a more positive note, tomorrow's dress up day for Snow Week is "Favorite Book Character" Day, so I'm going to be Ms. Frizzle. But I'm afraid I have to leave you on a less positive note: I forgot my phone at school. I took it out to look at the calendar on it and left it on the teacher desk right by the computer. Hopefully no one desperately needs to get a hold of me tonight!
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