Eat Your Vegetables

One of my honors students announced in class today that if school subjects were food, then mathematics would be vegetables. I can't think of a more appropriate analogy.

Aaaaand I'm spent.

I stayed at school way too late today. Until 6:30pm or so, which means I was in the building for twelve hours. That's far too long of a time to spend in a high school.

The purpose of my extended day was organization. I spent 11 hours correcting work this weekend. (11... just count them, I know you won't.) Which, again, is far too long to be working when not required. Usually I get through a couple hours of correcting work on the weekends and I give up. This weekend, however, I was motivated (some might say "inspired") to work and become more organized. And this inspiration extended into today.

I suppose the main cause of my motivation comes from the frightening fact that the semester ends next Friday. And since next semester I'm scheduled to teach two of the same courses as I am teaching currently, a little organization will most certainly help me through. So tonight I stayed at school, organizing all of the original handouts I've created over the semester into binders. Each class has a set of binders, and each binder has all the handouts, overheads, and answer keys for 1 of 9 units.

I'd like to enter into next semester with a little self assurance, knowing that I'll be able to simply open up a binder and re-use much of what I've created thus far. It's exciting to know that that point is coming up soon.

Pop Quiz

What do you do when your best students are having a difficult time with a simple topic? What if you only have three more days to cover material (and three days worth of material to cover) in your class before you need to begin review for the final exam?

I've been teaching area and perimeter in my honors geometry class. This is not a difficult topic, in my opinion. So when I gave my students a pop-quiz on the subject, I was surprised to see how many of them believed the problems were tough. At the end of my quizzes, I like to ask questions about how students felt they performed on the quiz, or how difficult they thought the problems were. I haven't done this very much lately. I should be doing it more because it gives me so much information about how to pace my class.

The students, in general, did very well. But I expected them to do better, since I allowed them to use their notes. But the most surprising part was when students couldn't answer questions even with their notes. This confused me a great deal. These students had the formulas. They had example problems. And the problems I gave were not particularly challenging. Furthermore, this is not a class that needs a lot of hand-holding. Yet, several students weren't able to answer the questions.

I wonder what they'll say when I pass back the quizzes tomorrow.