Mrs. Evans Blog

Hi Readers, My Externship is coming to an end. I have just 1 day left. Overall, it has been a great summer experience. I have enjoyed working in the business world and seeing what it's like to do something other than teach. Since I only have 1 year of teaching under my belt, there were times in my first year when I wondered if I was really cut out to be a teacher after some of those awful days when you want to cry. Spending the summer doing something different but all the while thinking about how it will apply to a fresh start and a new year, I feel like I've been affirmed that teaching is worth it and is what I love to do. I enjoyed the projects and working with people that I had for the last 6 weeks, but I'm the most excited about taking what I've learned back to school, using the new lessons I've come up with this year, and hopefully seeing some positive changes in my classroom this year. Another huge blessing was getting to network and meet other math teache...

What has the experience meant to me? What will you take with you to the classroom? How can the experience be made better or more effective? Working at Hy-Vee has been a good experience for me. I liked working for Hy-Vee when I was in high school and early college, and I enjoyed working with all the people this summer. Everyone was friendly and I feel like I got to know more about what it's like to work in a business. I'm glad I have that knowledge to pass on to my students now. This externship has shown me the importance of 21st Century Skills. Communication and problem solving are so important! I think my conviction as to the importance of these 2 things will cause an inevitable change in the way I teach. I don't think this externship was one that would only benefit a math teacher. I think any teacher who wants to experience the world of business and have a better idea of what most students will face after school would learn a lot and benefit from the experience I had h...

1. How can your business (or others) be more involved in your classroom? I would love to bring in guest speekers for certain topics. The kids get used to hearing me every day, but if I brought in someone from the world outside of education, I think it would be motivating and show the kids a differnt perspective as well as make that content even more authentic and relevant. 2. What can you or your school do to engage students in the real world? Field trips would be great. I would love to do a project based lesson where students had to do some research in Hy-Vee on something like signs and involve Geometric Probability or do something with area or volume and how the store is set up. It would be neat to actually take a day to go to the grocery store and do some research and measuring and even ask the employees some questions. I think the easier way of getting students engaged in the real world is to give them assignments and ask them questions that make them think about the real w...

I feel out of the loop after being in Vegas for a week! I wasn't sure how much I would miss while I was gone. Sam and James made some videos and continued working on training and manuals, but I was able to jump right back in with what they were working on. The last few days we've been considering the challenges of training 4 people at a time vs. training 100 people at a time. This is something teachers think about all the time. We don't have 100 students, but we're teaching full classrooms with close to 30 students so we often can't do the same things that we would do with just 4. I've tried using methods of grouping and differentiated instruction so that they're learning in smaller groups and helping each other out. With some of these methods they can go at their own pace and are hopefully more comfortable asking questions. We talked about ways to improve Hy-Vee's large group training by having the trainees turn to their neighbor and take 2 minutes to...

I was reading a few teachers talking about teaching their students to use maps and analyse the changes as well as using GPS and geocashing to use latitude and longitude. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you guys are science teachers? Based on that assumption, I was thinking it would be neat to incorporate a corresponding math project involving graphing. Maybe the students first learn about it with the science teachers. They do the project based lesson with maps and GPS. Then they could come to my math class and create their own map including cordinates. They could use slope and find distances between locations on their map. They could even hide their own treasures around the school campus and then trade their maps with other students to find each others' "treasures." They could use the concept of slope to tell students how to find the treasure. Maybe they have to start at a certain latitude or longitude and then go a certain direction with a certain slope, and they woul...

Hi everyone! This is the end of my 4th week, and the last month has really flown by. I completed a 57 page manual yesterday which felt pretty satisfying. I was writing a manual about all of the reports that can be viewed using Hy-Vee's software. There are probably 30 or 40 different reports. While I understand how to access and view them, I didn't always understand why an employee would use them or which parts would be the most useful. While I was able to write the manual and give basic instructions, this is an example of how sometimes you can understand the procedures, maybe even sound like an expert, but perhaps miss the application portion of something. This reminds me a lot of my students. We teach graphing and equations of lines and slope. They memorize (y1 - y2)/(x1 - x2) = slope and can use it really well if you give them 2 points. Give them a real life scenario and ask them what the slope represents or what the slope would be, and often just knowing that procedure does ...