First Day with Students

Today was my first day with students. I had the same basic plan mapped out for my three classes. Today was basically a day of rules and expectations. Of course we were quickly put off schedule. FOCUS was scheduled to get our ID pictures taken during first period. I start teaching second period. Surprisingly enough the pictures ran late and took up half of second period. So half of what I had planed for the first class never happened. We will continue tomorrow.
Then when I was able to get a full class, I realized that it did not take quite as long as I anticipated. I will be scheduling 70 minutes of activities for the rest of my 50 minute periods. I was able to add a bit more for the third period. That is the advantage of the same plan for multiple classes. You can fix stuff from one class to the next. Also I had a visitor for my third period. Rod, a former teacher (his picture is in an earlier post) who has subbing for Lorraine observed most of my class. He thought it went well and offered a couple of suggestions.
Tomorrow I will start with some diagnostic testing. I also plan to meet with each student for about 5 minutes this week to make sure I know where they are all started. This way I can figure out how to differentiate my classes.
Overall I am happy with the first day. The one disadvantage of having the same plan for all the classes is that I have a couple of students in multiple classes. It will be interesting teaching Algebra and Geometry at the same time to a couple of students.