When I post the objective I have it between my signs that say “Goal for the Day” and Learning Objective.  I used to seperate and do both but my students had trouble understanding the “official” standard and needed it simplified for their benefit.  I show it for their benefit not for my admins benefit.

Key Club International is the high school organization sponsored by Kiwanis International. Key Club assists Kiwanis in carrying out its mission to serve the children of the world. High school student members of Key Club perform acts of service in their communities, such as cleaning up parks, collecting clothing and organizing food drives. They also learn leadership skills by running meetings, planning projects and holding elected leadership positions at the club, district and international levels.

I have served as a volunteer advisor for the treasurer for Key Club from Spring 2013-Fall 2014.  Wenesday meetings are weekly.  Board meetings are monthly.

I also attended the Key Club conference in 2014.

My first semester in Directed STudies 2014 has been mere survival.  Many changes have occurred in our district and this has been the year in which directed studies has taken a huge hit in regards to priority.  When I first started teaching DS, I had mentors in my classroom.  Four to be exact.  The goal was to build relationship with the mentors who would then keep track of a certain group of students and help them to maintain on tast.  At this point people realized that many of these students were doing poorly in all classes (not just math).  The idea was for them to be connected with an adult who would provide care and concern.  We focused on basic skills so that test scores would improve.  Class size was kept to around 24 at the most.

When the contract was negotiated we lost our mentors.  This was doable the first year in that the class size was reasonable.  This year however, we have no mentors and I am working with 34 students who are all needing one on one help.  To make matters worse I have cliques, and groups of enemies all in the same class.  I am have racial issues where the class if left to do group work will move into “their own”.  Daily I dreaded teaching DS.

I have come back this semester with some new goals.  The admins have redesigned the purpose for the class to help with the students current math class.

My goals include:

1.)  Divide the class into their groups by their math teacher.  I have 8 groups of GEo by their math teacher, 1 group of Alg II, and 1 group of Alg I.

2.)  In their groups I promote teacm building activities.  They are with students that they normally might not hang with.  This will hopefully help with all of the put downs and language issues.  We need to promote each other up not put down like last semester.

3.)  Students are going to see application and relevance to what is being taught in their regular math class.  This is going to be a big challenge especially with the diversity in my class.

So far, I have started off with team building activities such as their team flag and have purchases team binders.  This is a work in progress.