Post date: Jan 14, 2012 5:4:3 AM
Happy Friday (the 13th!) All!
Contrary to urban legend, this was a great day -- and a great week. The sunny weather, good dispositions, and productive classes all helped to make our time together enjoyable and valuable. I love almost every day at DCS and appreciate all the kindness, sincerity, and dedication that make our school "the other best place on Earth".
English: Far and above, the greatest highlight was the student's speeches. I've been so extremely impressed by the skill and passion that each presenter has shown. The topics are varied and the delivery invigorating. What also blows me away are the comments that the "audience" makes to each presenter after their speech. Almost all show insight and authentic appreciation as well as some valuable suggestions or friendly critique. We're a little bit more than half way done with the presentation schedule, but if any parents want to see something amazing, feel free to stop by for the frist 15 minutes of ELA every day. By the way, parents, if your student has not signed up for a spot, and/or entered their topic onto the form, please encourage them to do so.
Another ELA accomplishment of the week was the choosing of "dystopian society" books and their first group meeting (Tuesday). I sincerely appreciate that so many kids were able to get their books on extremely short notice and despite the limited availability of some. From what I've heard, most students and the parent facilitators are enjoying these and understanding the common themes.
Other activities of the week included reading an article on food poisoning, getting the Wordy Wednesday vocabulary selections from our 1000 Words for High School database, doing the last of 10 daily edits and turning in the set, and completing a "CAPS packet" that teaches the finer points of capitalization rules in a variety of situations.
Science: The daily schedule for this week usually involved a progression through a series of self-paced individual and small-group projects. These included the construction of a periodic strip of the elements that evolved into a table, the formation of questions gleaned from the Kids Discover magazine on atoms, the preparation for a quick presentation of element families, and the completion of "posters" giving an overview of each section in the book (lots of room for improvement on some of those, by the way). I had the iPads in class for two days and they were helpful for a variety of tasks -- quick to start up, intuitive to use, and easy to collect and store. Another effective piece of technology that we used this week were the CPS "clickers". Questions are displayed on the projector and students "click in" their answers using their individual remote. The histogram quickly shows the distribution of answers and the kids can then engage in a quick and effective discussion of which answer is right (I didn't have the software display that this time) and why. Perhaps as a result of that process, the actual test scores were extremely high -- with about half of the class getting perfect scores!
Other Things: With the semester change approaching many students have become a bit more attentive to their grades. Although they are important, lets keep in mind that grades are only one indicator of student learning and achievement. My thoughts are detailed ad nauseam on the grades page of my website. The grades will still fluctuate a bit next week as new assignments are given and some old ones are scored, but as of Wednesday of this week I'm not accepting any more late work, assignment redos, or extra credit.
Lastly, for my class, I want to express my appreciation to those who have done some self-reflection and done their part to improve the class atmosphere. I know that it hasn't been easy to realize that attitudes and behaviors are influencing others (teachers and students alike). Change takes effort and time so be patient with yourselves and each other as we all work to better ourselves as well as our experiences together.
Love y'all and I'll see you Tuesday!
Chris