The Last Day

Ah, I can’t believe it’s my last day here. Honestly, my time at Trottier felt so short. Fortunately today I saw all of the classes I was working with, sixth grade math, seventh grade PreAlgebra, eighth grade math (sort of…), and my film class.

I went first period to my film class. They were just starting an episode of Band of Brothers when Easy Company discovers concentration camps. Having gone to Auswitz during spring break this year with Chamber Orchestra, I had a few pictures on my computer from that particular concentration camp. I gave a short talk about what I learned at Auswitz and showed a few pictures of the outside of the concentration camp (I had not been allowed to take pictures of the inside). The kids seemed really interested in me and I guess the stories that I had heard from my tour were really heart-striking and they definitely plucked something in my eighth graders. I told them about the history of why there were concentration camps, how the Nazi’s brought people there, and what people did once they got to the concentration camps, describing a working man’s lifestyle and one of a person sent off to die in either the gas chambers or the “death wall.” I felt that the kids learned a lot from this because I didn’t tell them what they would read in a textbook, I told them a first hand experience of a guided tour at a concentration camp, the images I saw there, and I felt that I made the experience seem so real for them that they were like “Wow. Those were really dark times.”

The eighth grade Algebra I classes were unfortunately taking a quiz today. I went to Dunkin Donuts this morning and bought them munchkins because it was my last day and a lot of the kids probably didn’t eat breakfast if they had come in early for extra help. They really liked that. Hahaha. Good luck to them. One kid had told me that he was probably going to get a B while his friends told him he was going to get an A. I told him that if the Celtics win tonight, chances were that he would get an A. The future will look good if the Celtics win tonight.

In sixth grade today, the kids were working on figuring out the surface area of a cylinder. I’m not a huge believer in memorizing formulas for the sake of memorizing formulas. For these kinds of problems, I wanted the kids to see the big picture—How much wrapping paper would go around a cylinder. That would be…two circles and a rectangle that wrapped around and connected the two circles together. So as long as they found the area of the two circles and the rectangle (in whatever order they wanted), and added all of those areas together, I told them that they would be finding the surface area correctly. That’s so much easier than memorizing 2*pi*r^2+pi*d. There’s always the risk of mistaking diameter for radius in this formula. Until they know what the components are for the formula, I strongly encourage them to logically figure out what shapes they need to find the area of in order to find surface area, or, the amount of wrapping paper they would need to wrap a cylindrical shaped gift.

And to wrap things up, the seventh graders were not taking a quiz today, so they were able to throw a small party. One of the girls brought in cake. If the eighth graders weren’t taking a quiz today, they would have had a party too. Too bad…

Mr. Griffin’s kids are also really cute too…so are the sixth graders. I have to post this because it was so great.

Mrs. Griffin always asks her sixth graders to do their work out. One boy during class today said, “Yeah, I’m doing my work out. Yeah, I work out.” He does a little dance like he’s working out, and says it like the mainstream LMFAO lyrics, “Yeah, I work out.” Hahaha. That was so great.