Though I shirked my grading duties over break quite spectacularly over the under-two-week-long break, I thought I had planned pretty tightly under the circumstances (read: two fewer instruction days plus one less weekend before first period finals). I gave English the first part of their final and sectioned off a full day for explaining weather--a tricky topic last year--to Spanish.
I hit the first speed bump in English when clichés were still lost on the young ones after a 45-minute mini-lesson involving the worst love letters they could write. I did come up with a "Cliché Solution" formula, at least: go one step beyond the usual or do the opposite of what's expected. My favorite solutions would have to be taking something about declaring love "from the highest mountaintop" to "from the depleting ozone." That was rather poetic. A close second was the bright smile like Dorothy's ruby slippers that "brings me home to you." Still, by and large the class remained mystified and it seemed like a wash.
So I quick tapdanced into the part of the final where they look back on their uploaded side projects. They seemed to get it, and really, only one was ready for this step anyway. I stumbled over another speed bump with a project that was actually better than the writer's previous efforts, but still so...squishy, for lack of a better technical term...that I couldn't get a hold on how to fix it.
And then that one kid that can just ruin the day with well-placed whining (though in writing, so all the more lasting, hallelujah
) by calling me out for having misplaced his paper for a while and saying the first part of the final is "just one more high profile [something something] to make us fail." At least Ms. McKeithan backed me up saying they should have plenty of time to get all of their project things done.
And then Spanish made me rue the day I opened
Setting Limits in the Classroom. Of course the classroom culture has already been established, and there's little I can do at this late date to remedy my previous "Mixed Approach" ("Neither firm nor respectful," Mackenzie says). All I can say is there had better be a chapter for the times where 12 out of 30 kids need to be "given limited choices," and 4 of those 12 are guaranteed to get attitude when given limited choices.
To make matters worse, the goobers seem to have absorbed the weather stuff right away, and I was simply too bluh to verify with any degree of certainty if they were as good as they thought they were. I did, at least, space things out better in 4th, where I had them not only make a concrete poem of one weather word or phrase but also it's opposite. Then I made them do book-work for about 10 minutes (1 exercise) when they were getting to me. Much better than the panicked punitive note copying (since I had not yet copied the page for
tener vocabulary, in my zeal to keep the mashed potatoes from touching the peas and sectioning off topics).
Also, it seems to me
there was a time that tutoring was sort of invigorating, with people "getting it" and stuff. How I long for those days.
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