End of Summer....

already! I can't believe that it's gone by so fast. July went by very quickly since I was taking an online course, which was very condensed. Normally, it's a full semester course, so there was about 40 hours of course work a week.

School's are already opened, getting ready for the new school year. I'm out on Monday trying to get my name out to all the schools again. Hopefully I will be at some of the same schools as last year.

An exciting week -- old friends came for a short visit. I'm glad they had the chance to meet Simon Peter, who decided to show off and do many more tricks than I've seen before! Pictures to come! :)

quadratic equations, baseballs, footballs, and soccer balls...

For the past few nights, I've been having trouble falling asleep due to all these math scenarios that my students are having problems with. Since its almost exam time, some of the students have been coming to see me more often than before, and we are going over some of the concepts they are having difficulty with. I think that quadratic equations are giving all my students the heebie geebies, since they get all nervous about them. I'm trying really hard to get them to visualize the ball that is being thrown/kicked, because that right there follows the path of a parabola. They seem to just want to know how to do the question though... (Just tell me how to do this question!!!) and I'm saying to them...visualize it! If your looking for the time when the ball hits the ground, thing about what the height will be at that point!
Anyways...everynight for the past week now I've been rethinking of our tutoring sessions and wondering if I was able to help them...wondering if I could come up with a better analogy or strategy that will help them through it.
I think that I'm more worried about them and their exams than they are.......

So I did manage to check off almost every item on my short term to do list (still don't have that teaching contract yet..!!!), but I haven't had the time to update until now.
There was a training session at Oxford tonight, so I stayed and learned a lot about their program, the city, my colleagues, and how to deal with different situations. Not only was this informative, we also got these reusable cloth bags!! (Well, one bag.) Anyways, I've been thinking about getting some of these to use, since they are little more versatile than the bins, but I just have not decided which store I should buy them from. But now, I am content with my one Oxford branded bag. The other item that I was very excited to get tonight was an agenda! This was another item I was looking into buying, since I think I left mine behind in the midst of moving....but now, I don't have to go and buy one! I started using it tonight already! lol