But I'm also feeling like a horrible teacher, so I'm asking for help. Here's my situation:
I teach in a rural high school with a stellar reputation. We have about 1300 students, 87 of which are mine this semester. I teach three 80-minute periods of math II (check out the awesome way NC has broken up the high school CCSS http://maccss.ncdpi.wikispaces.net/Math+II+Standards), one of which is an honors course. And we are 1:1 MacBooks.
This is my first year teaching high school, so in my room so far we've started with a warm up each day (estimation180, visual patterns, mobiles, factoring/order of operations practice, and WODB), we then review the warm up and any questions they have on their homework (they have 5 questions each night, 3 of which are interleaved from previous days/weeks/months). Then I introduce a new topic (usually lecture- so far we've looked at quadratics in standard and vertex forms, factoring, and every way of finding zeros), go through 3-6 examples, then they do an exit ticket. This takes up the whole 80 minutes and it's common to run out of time.
The students are constantly saying they don't understand, but when I talk/plan with a fellow math teacher she's saying I'm making it as simple as I can. Out of my almost 90 students, about half are hardcore failing (like 30% or less), and I let them do corrections on everything as well as use an index card of info on quizzes/tests.
So, I see all these awesome ideas on Twitter and blogs, and wonder when people have the time to do these things. I'm literally introducing at least one new topic each day, and my students are struggling to keep up. Any ideas on how I can restructure my class to have time for these application/interactive activities? I want them to understand the concepts as well as see how this applies to anything beyond the mandated standards. I don't want to be a mediocre teacher anymore :(
