Last Friday I subbed for Amy, an integrative aide at the high school. I walked into the high school office to check in and was promptly given a binder of notes and a geometry book about three inches thick. I made a note to myself to look into digital textbooks again.
I met briefly with our two special educators to get my assignment and to learn what was expected of me. My job was to assist a couple of students in geometry class and take detailed, organized notes. I leafed through the binder and found that Amy had set the bar pretty high in that regard.
Class was just starting as I walked into Geometry, but Mary took the time to give me some direction and to get me settled in. Students were taking a unit test in groups and my job (using the answer key) was to listen in and provide some prompting questions to keep them on track. They hardly needed me. I enjoyed seeing the students working together and actively reviewing the notes they had taken to complete the problems.
After the test, students worked on some classwork problems. Mary circulated around the class the entire time assisting students (and me). Her explanations jogged my memory and the rules and formulas of geometry started to return.
Thinking back to when I was in high school, I definitely enjoyed geometry more than algebra. I liked working with shapes, angles, and using formulas to solve equations. For some reason, using the Pythagorean Theorem to find the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle gave me great satisfaction. After 25+ years, I was so pleased to discover that finding the length of a hypotenuse still gave me that math “high”. Okay, okay…I might be exaggerating a little, but Pythagoras actually might be one of those famous people in history that I would invite to dinner if I had the chance.
100 Hours in Mendocino Unified 