Episode 283: Back to School 26-27

Okay, so let's start with introducing yourself.

Hi, my name is Lydia Crush.

I'm an ESL teacher in Richmond, Virginia.

I've been teaching ESL for the last eight years, and this year I'm teaching primarily in math classes in education for Algebra 1.

My back-to-school tip or trick is being able to focus on the end goal, specifically for

unit

planning and lesson planning.

Having an idea of where I'm going helps me use my time more efficiently in determining practice activities, mastery checks, as well as how I'm going to introduce the students to that information.

When I'm recording videos, my personal trick is that if it's a topic that's new to me, I'll do a rough draft where I just talk through the information to myself.

And when I'm doing that, I'll realize things that I might want to expand on or things that I might want to cut.

That way I'm not having to re-record the same video two, three, four, five times.

That helps me have my videos be a little bit more focused before I actually hit record for the first time.

For newer folks, the thing that I realized my first year was that I was speaking very slowly, which made my videos boring.

I now feel a lot more comfortable speaking quickly in my videos.

Students have the capacity to pause if they need to pause.

Love it.

Thank you.

I have a question to follow up to this.

Was there anything that you did in this back to school season that you felt like really set you up, you or your students up for success?

One thing that helps me set myself and my room up for success is the physical space of things.

I find it really important that students need to be able to physically access any of the materials independently.

So yeah, I teach algebra one.

So we are using colored pencils for our notes.

We're using rulers.

We're using notes.

Okay, so let's start with introducing yourself.

Hi, my name is Lydia Crush.

I'm an ESL teacher in Richmond, Virginia.

I've been teaching ESL for the last eight years, and this year I'm teaching primarily in math classes in education for Algebra 1.

My back-to-school tip or trick is being able to focus on the end goal, specifically for

unit

planning and lesson planning.

Having an idea of where I'm going helps me use my time more efficiently in determining practice activities, mastery checks, as well as how I'm going to introduce the students to that information.

When I'm recording videos, my personal trick is that if it's a topic that's new to me, I'll do a rough draft where I just talk through the information to myself.

And when I'm doing that, I'll realize things that I might want to expand on or things that I might want to cut.

That way I'm not having to re-record the same video two, three, four, five times.

That helps me have my videos be a little bit more focused before I actually hit record for the first time.

For newer folks, the thing that I realized my first year was that I was speaking very slowly, which made my videos boring.

I now feel a lot more comfortable speaking quickly in my videos.

Students have the capacity to pause if they need to pause.

Love it.

Thank you.

I have a question to follow up to this.

Was there anything that you did in this back to school season that you felt like really set you up, you or your students up for success?

One thing that helps me set myself and my room up for success is the physical space of things.

I find it really important that students need to be able to physically access any of the materials independently.

So yeah, I teach algebra one.

So we are using colored pencils for our notes.

We're using rulers.

We're using notes.