OLD School Results

Well, the results are in...

And I think that is students had to complete homework to be marked present on a daily basis, homework scores would improve exponentially!

In my 3 classes of roughly 60 students total, I only had 2 students who didn't do the work.  TWO!  I was very impressed.

I think that students enjoyed being able to take ownership of their learning and do work at home.  I'm curious to see if other teachers had the same successes!

ACT Testing

Today was ACT testing. The 11th grade students were testing from 8:25 to 12:00. Many of our students in first block were out, so no class was taught. Mrs. Owens decided to let the 3rd and 4th block students use that time as a study hall since most of the students were exhausted, or checked out for the day.

Career Fair

Saturday, I attended the FCPS Career Fair. I was disappointed in this career fair. None of the schools knew what they would need (except for physics teachers Tommy!) I didn't understand why the schools had this career fair if they told everyone "I don't know." It was very frustrating and discouraging

No Snow Day!

Monday, March 5th, School is IN SESSION! Yep, it's true.  MMSK policy is that if local schools are out then students will not be counted absent and it is entirely up to the parents if they come to school or not.  We had 32 students today.  The prinicipal brought donuts for everyone, the "Baking Micro-economy" group made hot chocolate for everyone after we played outside in the snow...I mean "worked" outside.  We did a quick rotation through math, support and writing classes.  Then Baking class made chicken soup for everyone for lunch.  In the afternoon we primarily focused on review and some students got caught up on various assignments...
All in all, it was just an abbreviated day in terms of learning.  As a parent, I appreciate that the students had a safe and productive day that did not require a parent staying home from work.

Job Fair

The job fair this morning was pretty uneventful. The common response of most of the principals there was "we don't know what we have yet, but check with us in about a month or so". Because of this, I was able to move through them all pretty quickly. I suppose it is more advantageous for those employers to have a pool of potential employees to look to when they find out exactly what they need, but it sure makes us feel uneasy! I would prefer them to be begging for me to apply, but that's just me ;) In all seriousness, I'm not worried about it, but it was a much different experience than what I expected.

CHETL

We had a professional development conference this past week regarding CHETL (Characteristics of Highly Effective Teaching and Learning) this past week. I thought this was somewhat helpful in that we learned various things regarding implementing more rigorous coursework and engaging the students in more inquiry based activities. However, after the meeting was over, I found out that the other teachers had seen the exact same presentation just a few weeks earlier at a conference they attended. I would imagine that the administration would make sure that teachers aren't getting the same information disguised under different names (that can waste money). That was just surprising to me. When choosing PD, do administrators require all personnel to go to certain ones, and are some just option/are there ones to choose from? Because these two in question were both required for the teachers and just seemed redundant.

Finishing up the Cats

In anatomy, we just finished up with the test on the cat dissections. I think it was a good experience for me. This was my first time helping lead something like this, and I feel more confident in doing something like this in the future. Through-out, there were never really any problems with students not wanting to dissect the cats or anything like that, but all of them were aware of this component of the class before taking it. I suppose if someone is completely against dissections, then they just wouldn't sign up for the class. To my knowledge, this hasn't been a problem in the past, but there is discussion going on about having a separate anatomy class with a virtual dissection instead of the traditional one. I'm interested to see if there is a lot of turn out for this type of set-up.