A-day: Session 2

Affect:

For the lesson that I created for Andrew on the commutative, associative, and distributive properties, I had to seek outside teaching resources in order to refresh my memories of these concepts.  In order to do so I utilized resources listed on the Module F rubric and standards document posted on Blackboard.  They were not only very helpful as a review of the material for me as a pre-service teacher, but also as a summary of the main topics which students usually struggle with for this topic. 

In relation to my attitude towards teaching struggling math and science students, I feel more confident with each session.  I truly enjoy helping these students and it is my hope that they are enjoying and learning form these sessions as well.  My hopes were made a reality today, as Andrew confided in me that he loves coming to tutoring and makes sure to attend school every Monday, as he knows we will meet with me. 

Behavior:

After introducing the different properties and their rules to Andrew, we quickly began working on simplifying one- and two-part equations.  After our last lesson together, in which he breezed through the material, I figured that I would start Andrew out at a higher level and skip the lower level review.  However, I was surprised to discover that we should have begun at a lower level.  Although Andrew understood the concepts I was teaching him, as we worked through problems together, step-by-step, it was obvious that he lacked the basic problem solving skills which these properties are based on. 

He often confused the terms ‘simplify’ and solve’ as he attempted to solve many problems for the variable.  Andrew also had no knowledge of reciprocal multiplication of the rules of adding and subtracting negative numbers.  For our next session, I would like to focus on the basics of multiplying, dividing, adding, and subtracting positive and negative numbers, and fractions.

Overall, Andrew was able to complete the problems that I presented him.  However, I believe it would have been easier and that he will retain this information more effectively if we start from the beginning and work our way up to solving and simplifying equations. 

Content:

As discussed in class, Andrew is learning the context strand ‘Algebra’.  In relation to the lesson which I taught to Andrew and that which I intend to teach during our next session, the concepts that are most beneficial to focus on include patterns, sorting, comparing and classifying.  During the lesson, these were the three main activities which we practices in order to distinguish between the three different properties and the techniques used to simplify equations.  Andrew was able recognize patterns in the rules of the distributive, commutative, and associative properties and wrote and evaluated equations using this knowledge.  He also compared, sorted numbers with and without variables in order to isolate the variable and solve for various equations.