Kristy Chimera
MED 300
Journal #11
	This week we were only there for one day because Thursday is Thanksgiving. On Tuesday, they were doing a blood drive, which of course was taking place in the room that we teach in. So we had to go down to Mr. Koestler’s room, which is significantly smaller. We still had the students split up into three groups. Mr. Koestler did not want us to split them up like we usually do; he wanted us to teach them in one big group. Dr. Cushman explained to him that all three groups are at different lessons. Finally he agreed that we could not make one big group. So we had the students split up into their usual groups. It could have been a disaster if all of the students actually showed up, but of course that did not happen. I only had three students in my group, I think the other groups had about three or four each. 
	My students actually did well today. Yesenia is usually pretty good and knows what she is doing, so I was not surprised there. Jose was good for the first part of class when we were going over elimination using adding and subtracting, but when we started the elimination using multiplication, all Jose wanted to do was sleep. The biggest surprise of the day was Dominique. She is hardly ever there to begin with, and when she is there, she usually doesn’t participate, but today was a complete turn around. She knew exactly what to do for each step in solving the system of equations. Actually, Yesenia kept forgetting to carry her negative sign through and Dominique kept correcting her. It was great to see her participate. We actually got through about a lesson and a half. We finished lesson one, and got all the way through lesson two. Jose probably won’t do well on the test on this stuff because he just did not want to have anything to do with it, which is sad. I could not spend the time that I normally do trying to get him to participate, because it was just me teaching our group today; normally it is both Nichole and me. Mr. Koestler came over and tried to get him to wake up, as did I, but it just didn’t work. He participates only when he wants to, which is very frustrating.
	I think the students who were there for the past couple days (Yesenia and Dominique) will do well on the test for this material. Solving systems of equations has a lot of steps, but they seemed to know what to do if they went slowly and thought about what they were doing. I also have them explain why we do each step. For a while, Yesenia was guessing numbers to multiply one of the equations by. She finally said two, which was the correct answer, but when I asked her why, she did not know. After a little prompting and questioning, she eventually figured out it was because we wanted the coefficients of the y value to be the same, with only a difference in the sign of the number. I really think that the tests should have a space for explanations. I know Mr. Koestler doesn’t like having them explain their answers. I don’t understand why. If they can explain what they did, then we know that they really understand it. I can’t wait to have my own classroom so I can do whatever I want! My students will be able to explain everything that they do. That way, they’ll never ‘forget’ it, because they understand it, and did not just memorize it.