Nichole Oswald									9/20/07
MED308w									Journal Week 2:  9/18& 9/20

	This week at Lafayette I learned that the concepts I am teaching really need to be drilled into the students' heads.  I found that they do best when we work through examples as a class, where each student contributes to finding the answer.  However, I also learned that it is a good idea to be prepared with a lot of examples.  Most of the students do not understand the concept after just one or two examples, and it is hard to think of an example that works on the fly.  We [Kristy & myself] worked through problems that did draw on the students prior knowledge as well as real world situations.  
	The students were engaged, I try not to just lecture.  Students were coming up to the board to work through problems as well as answering questions.  We teach mainly through a class disscussion.  I find that the students pay attention more and seem to understand better when they are actively participating as opposed to just listening to me talk.  Today, we worked through another word problem, however this took a lot longer than I expected.  Some of the students had completely forgot how to solve the problem using the four problem solving steps.  Therefore, we had to reteach how to solve the problem, this took the majority of the class period.  However, we did start the next lesson and all of the students remembered how to solve equations with variables on both sides so we were able to make up the time.  It is also really hard to stick with the lesson schedules because not every student shows up everyday.  The first part of class is always spent reteaching what they missed.  Today one of our students had in school suspension, so she missed the review that we did for the test and also the new material.  It gets to be frustrating because I want them all to do well, but I can't teach them if they aren't there.