The last week of February

The last week of February went by incredibly fast, except for Thursday, which happened to be the same day I left for Columbia, MO and the True/False Film Festival. I really only had three days of actual teaching, as Thursday was the math benchmark test that I helped administer. I don't know why they scheduled the math benchmark less than a week before the English TAKs, seeing as the TAKs scores are a huge deal for the school and the benchmark is, well, just a test to see how well the kids *might* do on the actual TAKs.

I made a big push on TAKs skills this week and got these big 15 page packets for the kids to do in class and for homework. Gambling, I made the packet worth 35% of their grade so that even the kids who had done next to nothing could potentially pass the six weeks by trying their best on the packet. On the flipside, any kid who had an A could potentially NOT pass if they didn't turn in their work. Really, I just wanted to make sure that everyone, and I mean everyone, did their assignments for once. You couldn't believe how happy I was to see that work taken home actually made it back into my class and students were actually taking their work seriously.