Signed Numbers

On my way to an evaluation team meeting today (I want to write more about that...but don't feel I can confidentially...one bad thing about being myself online and not having a blog pseudonym), I had a bit of a heart to heart with my boss (principal). You might think, "on the way" isn't very long...but picture 100+ outdoor stairs from the school building to the admin building where the meeting was being held...lol. Anyway, he was asking me how things were going, if I could believe that the year is already almost halfway over, and how time has flown in the 1.5ish years I've been in VA. He also mentioned that I have 30 more years to go before retiring. After that comment, he asked about my professional goals: When you're getting ready to retire, what do you hope to have accomplished/done? At first, I didn't know how to respond. I'm not much for long-term planning. I'm lucky to know and have decided that I indeed will be staying in VA for at leas

Over my week-long Thanksgiving Break, I spent 1 1/2 days doing observations of other math classrooms. A bit of background: my major in college was Special Education - Deaf Education with minors in math and english. Basically, though, I was treated as an Elementary Education major, with the addition of some ASL classes. All of my observations and practicums, as well as my internship placements, were in elementary classrooms. I *did* observe in a public middle school program for d/hh students at one point, but other than that, all of my exposure was to elementary teaching methods. Tune into now, my 2nd year as a high school math teacher. I realized that the only high school math teachers I have ever observed were my own, and that was long enough ago that I don't remember specifics about what they did (let alone, while I was in high school I didn't really think I would ever be a high school math teacher...I started college majoring in music education with a minor in math thinkin