Reflections on Teaching » Blog Archive » Week 26 and 27 Pre and Post Spring Break

Reflections on Teaching » Blog Archive » Week 26 and 27 Pre and Post Spring Break:

Week 26 and 27 Pre and Post Spring Break

by alicemercer

Spring has infected my classroom. Pollen has brought allergies, to students and myself, and my students need to check-in with peers appears bottomless. On top of that, I had two stomach flu cases in the classroom. I look down on folks who start “counting-down” the days this soon in the school year, but this was one of those weeks when I will admit to being tempted to look at the calendar add up those days.

Be careful of what you ask…

Writing is not going on as strongly as it had been. I think the kids may be getting a bit too comfortable with the routine. Some are rushing and making careless mistakes. I’m going to look at taking a break from the writing routine or change what I’m asking for. I do a weekly writing prompt to check in with students. I’ll often ask them questions about their learning and my teaching. This week, I asked how they preferred to get assessed. The majority preferred multiple choice tests, because they were “easier” to do. Words like, faster, easy to figure out if I have the right answer, easy to guess if I don’t know the answer, came up a lot. I gave them a variety of choices (multiple choice, writing short answer, writing essays, reports, trifold projects, comics/graphics, or something else). The students that indicated “other” non-writing/multiple-choice were some of my lowest students who felt