Reply To: Mary's Progress Log

[Mary Manske]

*I’m really struggling to organize my routines. The Stand & Talks are going decently, and we’ve been doing a good job of coming up with places to incorporate these–did one today, another last week, and have a list of a few for next unit. The rest is…not good. 

I’m particularly frustrated and disappointed about Mental Math. I still need to figure out how to set up a bank of stuff and then use it. I have so many options for Estimation/Number Talks/Mental Math that I get overwhelmed by the options and do…nothing. I can’t seem to figure out how to be more intentional and organized so I can implement. 

*Revise and spiraling is going pretty well. Another teacher + my coteacher and I had good discussions about how to mix the next two units together…and then our course lead shot me down (a little) because the two units break across semesters. I think we can still do it but will need to be careful. It was great to have all three of us discussing it. 

*Choosing a task is going…poorly. We’re struggling to articulate clearly enough both what we want to do and how we want to go about it. We also can’t seem to decide what should come first–do we pick something and work on anticipating, building that skill so that we can add others later? Start on something else? Choose a task that we can work on everything all at once? To add to that, some of the team intially felt like anything we do has to be BIG–take at least a period, be complicated and long, have a lot of parts. 3/4 of us have read the 5 practices, 2 of us read/reread recently. I can’t figure out where we’re stuck and can’t seem to help getting unstuck :/

I have my evaluation sometime next week so I will be interested to talk with my boss about her thoughts around some of these. I would really like to improve with the routines and feel especially guilty about the Mental Math.