Meh.

Today was meh. I successfully delivered the spelling pretest, complete with the Monday ritual of shooting baskets to earn a shortened assignment. It's a lot of extemporaneous sentence construction, shuffling of papers to pass back and messing with the overhead, so I'm actually surprised it wasn't more chaotic. I have to say, I LOVE the ritual of making the 15th spelling word a random word from the dictionary and the kids love it, too.

I spent my first weekend correcting papers (last week's spelling assignments and the quiz I gave on literary elements), which wasn't too painful. The students proved to me that it is possible to do a spelling assignment with the list in front of you and still spell words wrong. I also found that the results of my quiz were a little weird. The kids had to spot three literary devices (alliteration, metaphor and personification) in Simon & Garfunkel's "I Am a Rock." The whole quiz was worth 12 points. The results were so odd that I decided to graph it out, and I found that for the most part 50% got an A or B and 50% got a D or F. What? As a teacher trying to be a good assessor, how do I interpret this data? Anyone better with stats or numbers should get back to me about this...

I had a horrible moment first hour when I realized my lesson was boring and not substantial enough to keep kids thinking all hour. We did spelling, took the notes for symbolism and then I wanted to move on to reading "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost. I like the poem and I like that's it's easy to understand and relate to and I like that it's a good example of symbolism. I don't like that there's not a lot to it--not a lot of interpretation is needed to get to the "point." Basically the discussion halted, I asked them to do some writing and it was awkward. 2nd hour had a similar problem--they ended up milling around doing nothing for the last few minutes of class. 3rd hour I added a quick activity brainstorming the ways certain colors can symbolize things (like green can mean life, renewal, envy, money, inexperience, etc.) The questions I asked also were more interpretive and better sequenced as I went along. I remembered to add a pre-reading activity which asked the kids about choices they'd made recently. I still didn't feel great about the lesson, though.

6th hour has degenerated into too many kids talking while I'm talking, constantly. I know I need to be tougher, especially with individual kids, but I swear to you I can never figure out who is talking at any given time! My goals are to a) move around the room more so I can be nearer to some of the chatty ones, b) call more kids out by name, c) take certain kids out into the hallway and tell them they're making my life harder, d) fall silent so they get quiet and e) practice my death stare. I got a little frustrated with them today. I need to work at being a hard ass.

The kids really did make some nice connections, though. I heard references to both Finding Nemo and Big Fish, as well as to real-life decisions (like choosing colleges). I just needed to find a more engaging way to discuss this poem, I think. I don't know.