Philosophy Without A Home

I spent all week telling students that the quarter ended on Friday and if they want to change their grade they had to turn in work on Friday. Still at least three students asked if they could turn in work today. I did have a big pile of work to review on Friday. Much of it was not good enough to make much of an impact on their grades. I try to use grades as a measure of student knowledge. Instead of making 25 packets of missing work, most of which will be thrown out, lost, or scribbled on and then deal with students demanding to know why their grade hasn't gone up because they "did the work", I make a review test of sorts. I offered it on Wednesday for students to take it home and prove that they know and understand the concepts I taught. Every single question included a second question asking how did you solve this question. Then I gave everyone the opportunity to work on it in class on Friday. This test could take anyone from an F to an A depending on the quality o

I meant to sit down Sunday and write, but well you know life happens. So the new curriculum is really going well. We had our first common summative assessment last week. Most students did fairly well.  I know most 7th grade math curriculum starts with ratios and use that as a theme, because it leads nicely into expressions and equations which are the starting point for 8th grade. Then a lot of intervention focused curriculum usually start with number sense and then on to ratios. I wanted to start with area. First of all most of the time students are short changed with area and statistics because they come at the end of the year and are most often left out because the teacher runs out of time. More importantly I know from experience that I have a lot of students, sometimes up to 50%, who struggle with basic math facts. I wanted my students to spend a lot of time practicing those math facts to start the year. There are also a ton of ancillary skills that come with multiplicati