curriculum troubles

It may make me a bad teacher that I've never really looked too closely at the Math 90 curriculum. It's not that I haven't been teaching the curriculum, just that Math departments have everything set up so nicely normally it's not really necessary. For the most part, I trust my fellow teachers and what they tell me.

The French textbook I'm using doesn't really set stuff up in the way/order I usually would teach stuff - hence the investigating into the curriculum to see exactly what I should be doing. Now it's not that I'm not following the curriculum, cause I am - kinda sorta. Following it as closely as one can considering how obvious it is that elementary schools aren't following it.

Now I know not everything can be blamed on elementary schools, kids are awesome at the "we've never seen that before!" when in fact they saw it in your class, last week, two days in a row. However, from my gr 9s definite lack of skills, and how obviously I'm following what should be more gr 8 curriculum than gr 9, what to do? It's definitely not wrong to travel backwards in the curriculum, but it is annoying. Especially when now it makes sense as to why many grade 10s have difficulty with the course. Spend too much time teaching what they should already know and you aren't able to prepare them for what they will need to know next semester.

Now I know the Math curriculum is under a complete overhaul, which is all good, but who is to say teachers will do anything different? How do you remedy elementary teachers who love reading and hate math? (don't worry, the English teachers have the same complaints in reverse, I'm aware.)

Ok, so really I'm annoyed that while I was pretty aware we were teaching "grade 9 lite" I didn't think I was reviewing stuff that shows up in the grade 6 column. Blah.

life update

Well, I think maybe I should be more like Heather and make smaller more frequent posts. My big long rants just take too long so I never post anything. Hopefully I'll have some time to come back and elaborate on some of this, but in the meantime this is where February and March went.

- I had a wonderful one year anniversary with Sean (best b/f ever!)
- I organized a slightly less good Valentine's Day
- Went to Calgary with Rach
- Heather came to visit from Montreal
- Went winter camping with the outdoor ed club
- I was "promoted" to assisstant manager at the Odeon
- Got to visit with JJ when she passed through
- I've been pretty consistently almost sick for 2 months
- Survived another round of parent-teacher interviews
- Got crazy kinds of dying sick for one day (no news from the doctor, so all the tests must say I'm fine)
- Have bought a condo in Lakeview
- Had a job interview with the public system (I think it went well)

and all sorts of other little day to day stuff. Now I'm off to sign papers about the condo, tres exciting!