Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire- Chapter 4 and 5- Writing and Add It Up

Chapter 4-Writing
In today's society, many people are losing the ability to write. Whether it is through texting, email, computer software, or anything else technological, we have found other ways to "write". Society has lost the ability to write because of the dependency on technology to do the writing for us. I remember my 8th grade math teacher saying he had lost the ability to write in cursive over the years because he always chose to write in print. That has stayed with me for a long time. There is also something I have found kind of disturbing when I'm writing an essay or paper in Microsoft Word. If I make a mistake such as forgetting to capitalize the first letter of a sentence or get the letters in a word mixed up, the computer program will automatically fix my mistake even without me noticing. That's one thing about writing that I think is so important. If you make a mistake writing, you have no choice but to fix it yourself. Writing is a very important skill to master. It's how you express yourself on paper. It's how you convey your thoughts in an essay. It's another way of communicating with people. It's a vital part of our lives that is easily being thrown away. I think as a teacher, it will be very important to keep my students interested and excited about writing.

Chapter 5- Add It Up
Math has always been a subject I wanted to like, but I never have. In fact, I've been quoted on many occasions as saying "I hate math!" I think it's like that for many students. I know as a child growing up, I saw how other students grasped the math concepts and I wanted to understand it like they did. I really liked Rafe's game "Buzz". It seems like a really good game to get kids to pay attention when they are counting and to really understand the meaning of the numbers. The mental math warm ups were neat too. Games like this would've been really helpful when I was in school. They seem fun and exciting. They really seem like games that would help students get excited about math. The games would be great bell-ringers to start the day off with. That would help keep the activity stress-free. Math activities used to be very stressful for me, but whenever we did a bell-ringer activity like these games could be, I always felt better about it. It was a chance to work on math and learn something new (if I didn't know how to work the problem) without being tested or graded on it. I hope I can help my students stay enthusiastic about math by using games like the "Buzz" game and the mental math warm ups.