A New Course

I taught a new course this year.  The course did not exist prior to this year, there is not a textbook to go along with the course, and the course was targeted for struggling students.  The class was titled Algebra Foundations, and that is exactly what it was.  The students assigned to this class had taken Pre-Algebra but did poorly in the course or came from a Special Education Pre-Algebra Pull-Out class.  The goal of the course was to prepare the students for Algebra 1, so they would go into Algebra 1 and be successful the following year.

I spent a lot of time with the state standards for both the Pre-Algebra (7th grade) and Algebra (8th grade) to determine what the curriculum would look like.  I revisited the standards often to guide what would be taught and how in depth we would go.  What did these students have to master (not just be exposed to) to be successful in Algebra 1.  Everything we did I created from scratch; lessons, assignments, activities, games, worksheets, etc.  So much time went into this class ... hours, and hours, and hours, and hours.  I had no idea how much time went into creating new class.

There were some rewards that came out of this new class.  There were some students that had MCA scores go up significantly ... very rewarding!