justagurl24's thoughts

Well I lived through it. I am so dissapointed with how I did on my first day. The day ended badly, with my class. I went so fast. I ended up with an extra 30 minutes of nothing. I went through my outline, expectations, and even the icebreaker. The more nervous I became the faster I went.

Grr.. I tend to beat myself up alot over little things, and certainly this is the case. I should have paced myself better, but I always do this.. I rush through things alot when I'm not talking about Math or something I'm not comfortable talking about. One of my flaws, I know. The students don't care that I messed up, they were actually pretty good. It's just I'm being way too hard on myself. I do this for every presentation that I do.

I feel like I'm having an epiphany, is this really where and what I want to be doing for the rest of my life. Maybe it's just first day anxiety, and I'll get over it in the next couple of days/weeks. But right now, I just feel like quitting and crawling under a bridge to cry. I know I'm definitely blowing things out of proportion over a minuscule event, but that's how I feel. The thing is I want to get my masters in Education technology, and this teaching "gig" feels unnecessary.

This feeling is the exact same way I felt when I got my first job. I wanted to quit the second day because I hated feeling new to something I was unfamiliar to. But you know what, I toughed it out and managed to work another 8 months after that second day. I made some good friends and learned to build relationships with young people. So maybe this feeling will go away, actually I know this feeling will go away. It's just getting over that hill is what's getting me down. I probably will say 4 months from now the exact same things I said about my first job. It's just day one, right? Tomorrow is another day.

Mood: sadly defeated

Posted by rom559 at 10:56 PM | Permalink

I recently came across a revelation when learning trig identities sin and cos. Here it is:

Trig Reference Angle Cheat Hand
Observe...

Flip down the finger that corresponds to the angle whose sine and cosine you need.
The number of fingers to the left gives you the sine, and the number of fingers to the right gives you the cosine.

So if you flip down your index finger which corresponds to 30 degrees...
there is one finger to the left.
and there are three fingers to the right.

Try it for the fingers that correspond to the other reference angles. For example, if you flip down your pinky, there are four fingers to the left (sin(90) = radical 4 over 2 = 1) and zero fingers to the right (cos 90 = radical 0 over 2 = 0.) It works!

It's just another way of organizing the cofunction behavior of sine and cosine to remember the values of five reference angles, but adults and kids both flip out when I show them. Kids especially feel that they "don't have to memorize" if they know this method.

credit: Kate Nowak

Posted by rom559 at 09:09 PM | Permalink

So, I have thought of a brilliant idea to combine math and drafting together. House Design!.. When I was in high school, I took Home Ec and Drafting, I absolutely loved it. The only problem was when I had my plan, I had to draw it out, it didn't turn out the way I wanted it to be.

So I have been playing the game "The Sims" for a couple of years.. and recently the new "Sims 3" has been released. I purchased this game, and the features are amazing. The one feature is the house building, personally I hate designing houses without a plan. When I was in highschool this game/program would have been perfect for me to visualize my plan. Offering this tool to students will greatly increase their vision of what they want to create. The only problem is getting funding for games "legally" on school computers. I thought I would state this idea here and now. Until later, I will keep this idea in my mind to further pass it on to someone who can benefit from this unique idea.

Posted by rom559 at 10:58 PM | Permalink