Week 17

I don't have much to say this week.

It was a confusing mixed up week with students grieving and services being held and things being canceled.

I should probably be saying some deep, meaningful things about life but I got nothing.

I tried one lesson with my geometry class about circumcenters but the whole thing failed. I couldn't even make a circumcenter on my own.

Algebra- still trying to wrap up graphing and finding slope and intercepts. I may be taking too long on this but I've decided if they don't learn anything else, they will learn linear functions. We've done the slope formula on every warm up for probably 4 weeks in a row now.

Then the week went downhill from there.

Today was our first home basketball game and so we had a pep rally/karaoke contest. It was super fun! The students weren't shy or timid and just sang their hearts out. Everyone needed a good laugh and it was just fun. At the end we sang Lean On Me and all the students stood up, leaning and singing, just like a movie. Then we did the Cupid Shuffle and it was like High School Musical 3.5 up in there. I gave up any semblance of sanity the rest of the afternoon and spent time karaoke-ing in my room, watching students have rap and dance battles, and the kids tried to teach me how to jerk.

Next week is finals. I'm a little nervous. I never took one in high school and so the idea of writing one is somewhat foreign. Other teachers do multiple choice in order to make it quick to grade. But I've been doing free response all year so it seems weird to change now. I'm thinking about doing some matching or multiple choice for vocab and then free response for actual problems. I will be spending the weekend creating that and a study guide. Another teacher said she gives a study guide with all the problems worked out by her. I think I will let the students work on the problems on their own and then give out the answers for final studying. How many questions do you put on your final? Do you pull problems straight off of earlier tests? Do you do any bonus/extra credit/anything different?