Top O’ the Mountain

Do you wish she was your leader?

First Unit Test

My mythology students have their first unit test tomorrow. I think they are ready since we reviewed quite a bit with puzzles and a game, I expect at least a B average. It makes me a little anxious no matter how they do.

When the seniors ace the first exam, they tend to relax and work less hard leading to difficulties and struggles later. When they don’t do well in the beginning, they tend to lose a bit of heart and their industry decreases.

My hope is that I can keep them focused and on track, especially because the first of two mini-projects are upcoming in the next two weeks. Time will tell.

Lucky Coincidence

I work with the Academic Teams at my high school, and we had a semifinal match in a quiz bowl event today and we had a fortuitous coincidence today.

Each day I put a “Useless Factoid” on the board for my students. Today’s was, “A slug is essentially a snail without a home.” This sounded better than “a slug is the only mollusk without a shell.”

Today at a critical juncture in the quiz bowl match, the question asked was “What is the only mollusk without…” At that moment one of my kids buzzed in and, in a giggling voice, said “a slug has no shell.” I and the alternate sitting next to me began laughing, covering our mouths so no one could hear us. My entire team on-stage was laughing, too.

After the match we explained our hilarity, which of course elicited a mentioning of serendipity from the host. Fortune smiled upon us today.

By the way, we won going away and have the championship on Friday. Go team!

Why Not Turn It In?

After reading a post by Mrs. Chili regarding the griping of her students when being held accountable for learning, I do have to admit a bit of frustration with one of my classes. Only 19 of my 32 American Literature students bothered to turn in a one-paragraph summary of a short story everyone read.

This is quite a frustration for me since I have been quite intentional preparing this class to do the writing and meeting basic expectations. Despite the grades on the summaries turned in being relatively low, I am more upset that 40% of the students couldn’t find the time to compose 10 sentences.

Unfortunately, I have been out of the classroom quite a bit in the last two weeks with tournaments around the state in three different extra-curriculars. However, I will have no time out of the classroom for the next few weeks, so I will begin conferencing with individual students on Monday. Also, I am giving the second writing, a thesis paragraph, tomorrow.

Other than the number of summaries not turned in, I was also a bit frustrated that the majority of the students who did turn in the assignment did not follow directions. I had a list of approximately 10 questions to answer “yes” to before turning in the summary. The first question states, “Did you double space your summary (whether handwritten or typed)?” Half of the students did not double space. Frustration city!

I guess I need to sit down with each student and begin to decipher why the assignment was not completed or why the directions were not followed. This is part of the reason why class size is such an important factor.

With such a basic assignment, I would expect nothing less than excellence from high school juniors. We will also have to compose another summary because I still need to see the students successfully show the skill, at least the ones who have not done so.

Contracts Support and Protect

I read an article today in the Washington Post which details how some teachers’ contracts are “restrictive” when districts want to pay teachers more or when districts wish to dictate in which schools teachers teach.

As my student in the first row loves to say when the obvious is presented, “Well, duh!”