C4T #2

For this C4T I was assigned to David Sladkey. David is a teacher at Naperville Central High School in Naperville, IL. The first blog post I commented on was 8 Ways to Incorporate Empathy into Your Teaching. In his post he discusses how teachers need to practice their empathy skills because sometimes teachers forget what it is like to be a student. David tells his readers that the first step is to Shadow a Student for a Day. David had a link to a summary of how his day of shadowing went and it was awesome. He was able to follow a student around all day and he learned a lot about student life at his school. The second step is to create a questionnaire for your students. With a questionnaire teachers are able to get immediate feedback. Teachers can also make them anonymous to get more genuine answers. The third step is to listen to the goals your students have. This allows for teachers to get a better understanding of their students. The fourth step is to do the homework. Many times teachers assign students homework that is not realistic. Students have more than just one class and they have other activities outside of school. This helps teachers to see whether or not the amount of homework they give is reasonable. The fifth step is to think about (pray for) each student. Teachers should think about their students as more than just a kid in a desk. It is important for a teacher to know who their students are in the classroom but also who they are outside the classroom. Teachers should think about a child's strengths and weaknesses. The sixth step is to call home early. Teachers need to realize that parent insight is priceless. The seventh step is to look at the records. David mentions that this may seem like an obvious step for teachers to do but sometimes they may be overlooked. The final step is to find activities that your students are involved in. There are many students who play sports, are in the band, go to youth groups, etc. Teachers need to remember that students have lives outside of your classroom. My comment for this post was "Dave, My name is Holly Shaw and I am an EDM 310 student at the University of South Alabama. Throughout my day I always catch myself saying "Does this teacher think his class is the only one that matters?”. Unfortunately I do believe there are some teachers who genuinely believe their class is most important. I hope to never be a teacher who is like this. I love the concept of student shadowing you have presented here. If more teachers would take the time like you did, I believe it would benefit students all over tremendously. I also like the idea of getting direct feedback from my students. I know as human beings we are NOT perfect and any feedback would be extremely helpful. Overall this post has given me so many great ideas for when I have a classroom and has me so excited. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences! I will be sure to keep them in mind."

The second blog post I commented on was Making a Face with DESMOS.com. The blog post shows teachers a new, exciting way to teach students about things such as circles, sine or cosine waves, and parabolas. The application is called desmos and the idea it to create a face using functions. In the post he gives a link to examples that his students prepared. This post was a cool idea that I would love to use in the future. For this post, my comment was "Dave, Thank you for introducing me to such a cool applicaiton. I love how students are able to learn about functions in an interactive way. I loved Tara Ramni's "Funny Lil Grandpa" example! I believe Desmos makes the learning less dull and more exciting. I am a huge math geek (proud of it) and I can remember being slightly bored when learning this material. From what I have seen I believe that this application is something I could very easily see myself using in the future."

After being assigned to Dave's blog and getting to read some of his posts, I have decided to add him to my PLN. His posts are informative and interesting. He gives incredible insight and ideas for math teachers. I thoroughly enjoyed my C4T assignment and look forward to future posts from Dave.