Kristy Chimera
MED308
Lafayette Journal #1

	I thought this week at Lafayette was interesting. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. For the most part, I think the students want to learn the material. There are a couple of students in our group that act like they don’t want to be there. We do have one girl who really seems to know what she is doing. It makes me wonder why she hasn’t passed the math A exam yet? Maybe she is a bad test taker. Hopefully we can help her, and all of the other students, get over their test anxiety by the end of the semester.
	I think we need to try to integrate more hands on learning with games or other manipulative. So far we have just done worksheet after worksheet, which is fine, but it does get boring after a while. I know that this was only the first week, and worksheets are great because the students have everything written down, but I think they might start to get bored very quickly if we don’t change it up a little. I do wish we weren’t as rushed as we are with the material. I think we could make the learning much more fun if we had more time on each topic. We are already an entire lesson plan behind and it is only the first week. Hopefully as the semester goes on, we can learn to get through the material a little more quickly, without sacrificing the students’ learning.
	Today we had two new students join our group. One girl just hasn’t been in school all week, and other student just started at Lafayette today. It was hard trying to get those two students caught up. Luckily, the one girl who I mentioned before, helped out the student who had been absent all week. I was really impressed by this. I really thought that she was just going to give her the answers to the worksheet that they were working on, but she didn’t. She actually went through each problem with her, explaining it as they went along. That showed me that she really does understand the material, if she can explain it to another student. 
	Next week, in at least one of our lessons, the worksheet has lines for explanations after each problem. I think this is really important and will get the students really thinking about what they were doing in each problem. I am excited to see what the students write as their explanations. This will really show if the students understand the material. If they do not understand it, then we need to change the way we are teaching.