Month: January 2021

  • Work from Home

    5 Tips for Working from Home

    So many teachers are choosing or are currently being faced with virtual teaching. Many teachers are doing so in the comfort of their own home. The classroom is now a teacher’s living room.  The teacher’s lounge is now the kitchen.  The lines between school and home were often blurred for teachers before because of bringing papers home to check, bringing lesson plans home to write and bringing the emotional baggage from the day home as well.  Those lines are being blurred even more as many teachers complete all their work at home. So now, more than ever, it is essential that you figure out a way to keep home and work separate.  There must be some line between the two, otherwise that line that was already blurred will disappear altogether.  Here are some tips, on keeping work and home separate: Find a designated workspace. If you have an office or den in your house, that would be the ideal place.  Only do your work in that one area.  Don’t work in your bed, on the couch or at the kitchen table if you have an area that you can designate as your workplace.  Your mind will then be able to shift into work mode when you are in the designated area, and still be able to be in home mode when you are no longer in that area.  If you don’t have a place that you can designate as a workspace, try to pick ONE place in your home where you will work.  If you have to work on the couch, pick the same place to always sit to do work and when you aren’t working, don’t sit in that place.   Set a work schedule. Try not to deviate from that schedule.  I do my work, for the most part, during the day.  I reserve the evening for my time with my family.  Setting my schedule has really helped me switch efficiently between work life and home life.  It allows me to focus on my family and my work.  I can sometimes be a workaholic, so I found that this was essential in my balance of work-home life.  I needed to be able to tell myself that it was ok to step away from work and not feel guilty about it.  You may be the opposite and instead, your family takes up all the time and you have a difficult time shifting away from family time to do your work.  Either way, setting a schedule helps define the openness of your day when working at home. Limit distractions. Limit work distractions during home time and limit home distractions during work time. During work time there are several home distractions you need to prepare for, such as notifications from your personal email, social media on your phone, or family members that want your attention.  During family time, you need to prepare for work email notifications or phone calls.  You need to decide ahead of time how to handle these distractions when they occur. Get ready for your day! Get showered and dressed as if you were actually going into work. Working in your pjs can further blur the line between home and work life.  If you wake up each morning and get ready as if you were going into your classroom, your brain gets into work mode.  If you stay in your pjs, you may struggle to get focused while working and then your association of getting into your pjs to relax may no longer occur.  I don’t leave my bedroom in the morning until I’ve made my bed, showered, and dressed for my day.  However, there are days where I will skip my make-up routine! Decompress. Set aside a short amount of time to decompress at the end of your work day. Usually, when you leave school for the day, you have a commute home that allows you to unwind.  You need the same thing at the end of your day when working at home.  I suggest a few minutes of mediation or silence, listening to some music, or maybe a few minutes to call a fellow teacher and chat like you would outside your classrooms at the end of a school day.  This will allow your brain to decompress from the work day and shift into your home life time. If you follow these tips, you should see clearer division between your work day and your home and family time.  Do you have additional tips that have helped while working at home?  If so, comment below!

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  • Engagement, Math

    3 Ways to Make Math Class Welcoming

    “I can’t do this. I’m not good at math. I’ve never been good at math.” One of the most challenging issues we face as teachers of math is students coming into the classroom already having a preconceived notion about their ability as math students. So many students walk into our classroom that first day and already feel anxious or beat-down because they feel they are not good at math or not a “math person”. This idea may have stemmed from feelings in math class in previous grades or even from home. When a student hears parents or caregivers claiming they just never understood math or aren’t a math person, the student may internalize that message and feel the same way. So what is a math teacher to do to combat those feelings that some students have? First, you must work on building community in the classroom to make your math class welcoming. Share a story with your students to build community in the classroom. Make it a math story. Can you think of a time when you struggled with math and overcame that struggle? That is a perfect story to tell your students. I always share with my students the time when I needed a math tutor. I had some struggles going on in my life and wasn’t focusing very well during math class. Completing the work became impossible for me because I didn’t know how to do it. My parents got me a math tutor to help out. While I had quite a bit that I needed to work on to get caught up, I eventually caught up and then no longer needed the math tutor. Sharing this story with my students makes them see me as a real person. They realize that just because I am a math teacher, math doesn’t always come easy to me. It helps my students realize the importance of paying attention during math class. It also shows them that getting extra help to understand something isn’t a bad thing. If you don’t have a specific math story you feel you can share with the students, share any story you have of a time that you have struggled with something and overcome it. The more stories and examples your students have of overcoming challenges the better! Allow your students to share their stories as well. Creating a safe, supportive math classroom helps build community. Help students identify their feelings. Many students don’t realize what’s holding them back in math is their own thoughts, which is why it is so important that students identify them. Have students complete a math survey within the first few weeks of school to identify their feelings about math. You can create your own survey, or grab my free math survey. This survey not only helps students identify their thoughts about math, but it also helps you identify the students that will need work on their mindset. Incorporating activities surrounding a growth mindset in your classroom with help students see that they can be successful in math and again. Help them understand that people aren’t good at math simply because they are born that way. Anyone can be successful at anything with effort, practice, determination and perseverance. Helping students change their thinking helps strengthen your math classroom community. Reward students for their perseverance and determination. A big struggle with teaching a large number of students is the expectation that students will all learn the concepts at the same time. Your time is limited in the classroom, so after you’ve taken a test, you have to move onto the next concept. However, what if some of the students haven’t grasped the concepts that you just tested on? This is a common occurrence. Continuing to incorporate previous concepts into warm-ups and discussion is important, but helping students see the importance of their own continued learning is equally important. Your job as a teacher is not just to teach, but to ensure that students have learned. That’s why I allow students to retake tests and redo assignments for more credit. I know that there is much debate about this practice on both sides, but I have found that it is what aligns best with my values and beliefs as a teacher. Rewarding students who continue to persevere and are determined to improve is a simple way to show students that you believe in them and their abilities. This also helps create an emotionally-safe classroom because students won’t feel the pressure (and sometimes anxiety) of needing to be perfect on the first try.   Do you have another way to help our students become confident, happy math students? Share it in the comments for others!

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