Nichole Oswald									9/27/07
MED300/ Journal 3								Dates: 9/25 & 9/27

	I just have to start by saying, that I have so much fun teaching at Lafayette.  The students in my group are great.  They are really starting to show their personalities and it is a lot of fun.  They are also really starting to open up to me.  When the students walk in before the bell rings, I always ask them how they are doing or what's new, or something else along those lines.  Usually I get a response of  "ok" or "nothing", sometimes they just nod their heads.  But today they all actually talked to me.  I think they have all finally got past the stage where they were trying to figure out how to react to me.  I also noticed that today all of the students in the group participated.  I was very excited because even Jose participated!  He has spent the last couple of weeks sitting by himself, drawing pictures the entire class time.  I don't know what happened to make things different today, but he sat in the front and was answering a lot of questions.  I feel that students are more willing to participate when they are comfortable in the classroom setting.
	Today we started talking about percent of change.  We related it to the students prior knowledge, by talking about going shopping when there is a sale and then what happens to the price when we take the products to the cashier (sales tax).  The students seemed to pick up on what we were doing rather quickly, which is always good because it is so easy to fall behind.  We had the students tell us what to do instead of us just telling them.  I would also ask them the same question 3 different ways, just to make sure that they really understood.  After the third rephrasing they would all tell me the answer again and then tell me how obvious the answer was because they already told me how to do it.  It seems obvious to them now, but we will see how they do when it comes to the test.  Hopefully, the answers will be just as obvious.