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October 31
Today was standard to the point of being boring. I almost didn't even
do this journal entry. Let's see...
In Algebra II, I gave a quiz that I thought would last 20 minutes.
When it dragged on for nearly the entire hour, I decided to just skip the
lesson for that day. We quickly went over homework and the class was
dismissed. I had a bad feeling about that quiz when I saw how long it
took the class to do it. After grading it, I see that my feeling was
right -- the class, as a whole, bombed it. I probably won't do anything
about it, though. It seems like most of the mistakes were just dumb ones.
A few of the papers indicated that the taker was clueless, but they were
the minority. I am just going to tell the class that if anyone has any
problems, see me after class and we'll work out something.
I gave a quiz in Algebra I, also. I took all of the questions
directly out of homework so the kids can't complain that the test was
harder then the homework. In fact, I am planning on telling the kids
to check the answers to the quiz by looking at their homework. They
did do the homework, hmm? By and large, both classes did very well
on the quiz. That was good.
I also discovered that I will have to adjust to teaching geometry.
In retrospect, I see that I should have split up the class into groups
much sooner then I did. The problem cropped up when I was leading the
class in discovering how to construct a perpendicular bisector using
only a straightedge and a compass. Some of the kids got it immediately,
but a select few were clueless. By helping these students out, I held
back a large majority of the class. Ah well...
