8 July 2008, Tuesday Part II

Part II:
Today’s class was slightly better. Brandon said they were pretty bad for him so they must have gotten it out. Zederick was a disaster. He refused to move, so I told him that was his warning, waited a few seconds and asked him to move again. He still refused, and this time I told him to move to the penalty box. He refused and called me a name so I told him to leave the room. To my surprise, he actually left. Granted it was storming out, but he still moved. Katie went after him and I guess she talked to him because he came back in the room in a few minutes into his new seat.

The effects of the point system were minimal but generally positive. At times, a few students tried to get others to be quiet because they didn’t want me getting points, but I think more often when I gave myself a point the class mocked the way I said it or just didn’t care. I need to do a better job of bringing back control of the entire class. Several times students were talking or calling out, and while it wasn’t a lot, it was enough to be disruptive. I don’t have enough time to teach what I need to teach what I need to get through as it is so I don’t want to waste time bringing everyone back together, but I’m thinking in the long-term – like when I have an entire school year – the time I spend bringing the class back to order early in the year, even if its fairly often, will be offset by the time I save later on.

The most frustrating part of the class for me was that Jennifer was getting everything we were doing in class – I had to tell her I needed to call on other people so much because she kept being the only person with her hand raised. However, when the test came, she bombed. Thankfully, she talked to me at lunch and wanted to know what went wrong. I hadn’t graded the tests so it wasn’t like she got the test back and knew she bombed, she knew it from the start and told me she knew it in class but didn’t get it on the test. At lunch we went over the assessment and she seemed to be getting it, but I don’t know if she’ll still understand it on the CRCT tomorrow.

Lunch took longer than I expected and on the way back the principal saw the line and stopped us several times. So, incombination with class running about 5 minutes over, we got back at 11:50 instead of 11:40. Ms. Jones had said she wanted 20 minutes with the students to review geometry so I was hoping she’d be done by 12:10 and Chris would be able to start. That didn’t happen…I don’t know what time he got to start, but he was also interrupted by a fire drill (yes, on the day before the test the school decided they needed to have a fire drill. Why they waited until basically the second to last day to do this, I don’t know. At least we didn’t have a fire during the first four plus weeks of school. Anyway I feel really bad because it screwed up Chris’s review. There were several incredible aspects of Ms. Jones’ lesson. Her classroom management is insane. She stands at the board, facing the board, and reminds everyone that when she’s writing the should be talking – and the listened. She tells everyone to take out a pencil and paper – and magically everyone has one. They never had pencil and paper for us. The other incredibly sad thing was that not a single student could even venture a guess at what the formula for a circle was. This is 8th grade summer school.