On a naughty note, during the last period of the day I had a little slip up.  We have this intramural period, today was whiffle ball.  I went to help our Discovery Home Room catch a ball and I missed. And as my husband can tell you I sometime let some choice curse words fly.  Under my breath I said SHIT.  I don’t think anyone heard it, but boy was I embarrassed.

I was observed today by our two writing specialists.  I did teach one class and that was my Current Events class.  We’ll see what they say.  They are going to come back tomorrow during 8th period and let me know what they want me to do.  Our school is in Improvement 1, and they are really working on their writing skills.

I spent most of the day trying to catch up on grades and working on my portfolio.

Officially I had a great lesson with the current events class.  I made up a powerpoint on Haiti. One of the students in the class is going to be traveling there early next year and at her request we had a lesson on it.  I was able to incorporate some really good material.  I also had the Overhead Projector.  I think the Co-Op was impressed by the technology use today.

This was also parent-teacher conferences night for the first marking period.  It’s interesting to note that many of the worst graded students did not have parental representation at conferences. The school has set up another round of conferences in December specifically for those students who are in danger of failing the year. 

Today’s lesson was a no-brainer. My co-op has requested that the students actually read the textbook. So that was what we did today. As we read we filled out the Section 1, Chapter 3 notes page provided by the textbook company. 

As i mentioned yesterday, if I were to do this lesson again I would use different resources, and change the parameters of the project.

I looked through the 5 questions I asked during journal time, 98% of the students admitted that they did not study or studied very little.  The other intersting fact was that they felt they should have been offered an open book quiz like the students had last year.  I explained that I wanted to know what they knew, not what the book knew. 

On the fly, I created a project that I hope will help boost their grades. We started it today and I must finish it tomorrow.  The Project is a mini poster on the origins of each colony.  The project has some serious flaws that I would work out if I ever did this again.  One thing I did was pre-research the topics and created packets for the kids. Unfortunately I didn’t look at reading levels or plan that some students would refuse to actually read the notes to complete the project.  I would just use the information in the book next time. It may  not hav all the answers, but it sure is written on a level they understand.

The quiz they took on Friday and the Patriot’s Pen Essay they wrote about two weeks ago.  I purposely did not hand back or grade the essay because I knew they were abismal.  So I spent hours on Saturday grading them.  I must admit I was rather hard on the students. So many failed the essay paper.  combined with the quiz grade many of the students will be working all marking period to bring their grades up to passing. 

In an effort to give the students a chance to bring their grades up I offered to let them earn back 1/2 a point for each quiz question the fixed correctly.  I have very little hope that some of the more challenging students will actually accept the offer.