Kristy Chimera
MED 300
Journal #12

	On Tuesday I taught with Kevin again. We reviewed real quick since it was thanksgiving and they had a long weekend. Then we moved on to the new material. The students in Kevin’s group were not really into it. They were not participating like they did the first time I taught with him. We were doing elimination using addition and subtraction. They seemed to understand the elimination using addition, but when we got to subtraction, they did not get it. It took a while, but we finally got them to realize that they had to multiply the negative to every term in the equation for it to work. I kind of got carried away and just changed the addition problem that we were using, to a subtraction problem instead of moving on to the next example in the notes. We ended up finishing my example and never got to the last example in the notes because I got carried away. We would’ve finished the lesson if I hadn’t done that. Oh well; one more example was probably good for them anyways. I’m still not sure if they completely get it; I guess we will find out after the test on Friday.
	On Thursday, we finally saw the new girl that joined our group (I was back to my regular group with Nichole). There is a girl Kianna that just came to the school maybe three weeks ago. She was there on a Monday or Wednesday for her first day. We had not seen her on a Tuesday or Thursday yet. Of course she came in today with about ten minutes left, but at least she showed up. Today’s lesson actually went pretty well. We were dividing monomials. I did not think that it was going to go over very well, but I was wrong. They understood that they had to add the exponents for multiplication, and subtract them for division if the bases were the same. Even Jose knew what he was doing. However, when it was time to come up with the general form multiplying (an)m  they did not get that it was anm. It was really hard to get them to see that we could write an, m times. They kept trying to guess numbers. Jose just kept guessing infinity. They didn’t get that n and m were variables and stood for numbers, actually constants, which was my mistake. I should’ve made that clearer. Next time I will have to try to explain it better so they understand it.