Shocking Moment

The other day I was instructing at the promethean board. Our topic was graphing linear inequalities. I gave them two methods on how to figure out where to shade on the graph. We were talking about the second method which was choosing a coordinate point on the graph, plugging it into the inequality, and simplifying to figure out whether the point is part of the solution set. Since this was a secondary method, I did not plan to spend much time on explaining this process and I also thought it was pretty straightforward. When we put the method into practice, I had one student ask me to explain it again. So I described how to follow the process and showed him an example (other students were practicing problems, so it wasn’t interrupting class). He still didn’t understand what I was saying which shocked me because this seems to me to be the easy part of the lesson. I re-explained, drawing the points and writing out arrows to show him my steps. He claimed to understand at that point but I wasn’t convinced. At this time the other students were ready to move on so I couldn’t hold up the lesson any longer. While I continued with instruction, my mentor teacher sat with him to work on the idea. Later in the week we took a quiz that included that concept and he was unable to do it.

            First of all, it really shocked me that this student was unable to understand what seemed to me as a simple concept. Also, I knew that if he couldn’t understand this that he definitely could not have understood some of the other material that is much more difficult in the class. The other thing that struck me was that I could not think of another way to describe the process to him. Maybe if I had taken time to consider this in my preplanning and if we had time in class for him to practice the concept over and other again he might have caught on. Because the other students in the class were able to understand the concept, I would like to think that his confusion came from his own misunderstanding and not my ability to teach it. However, I would have liked to have been able to have a strategy ready so that I could have explained it in a way that he would have understood the idea. Because of what he has shown on his tests and quizzes, my mentor teacher and I think that he is misplaced in this class. However, because there are students in other Algebra 2A classes that have a lower grade than him, they will not move him into another classroom. We have students that are slower than the class average, but the pace is not too rigorous that they get left behind. The big picture of what this incident shows me is that as teachers, we must balance our class so that the average level students can learn at an appropriate rate but that we must consider the way below average students or misplaced students so that we do not leave them behind. I am hoping that as I progress through my teaching experience, I will be prepared for situations such as these.