TheMrDShow - Episode Five: Quiz Numero Uno
Hello! Welcome back to the Mr. D show - I am your host, Mr. D. Last week, my students took the first summative quiz of the year - right on day seventeen of school. After seeing their scores, some of my students may decide to go ahead and cash in their one retake of this first grading period. Just a reminder - our school’s retake policy allows students ONE retake of a summative grade per grading period per class. Because of the short nature of our first grading period, students will only take THREE quizzes this opening grading window. Therefore, students can still elect to do a retake after they see what they score on quiz two - currently scheduled for Friday, September 27th.
Now, let’s talk about a couple of things before we dive into this week’s preview - first, the positive: this group, after just seventeen days of school, seems like a fun-loving group. I feel closer to them in four and a half weeks than I did my previous two groups of students by a longshot. This past Thursday’s pep rally was a microcosm of that - students were into it, they were having a good time, and I am proud to be their teacher. I don’t want anybody else other than the students I currently have.
With that said, this group has been a little slow going out of the gate. To be fair, I have pushed them the first four weeks of school to see how they would respond. It’s been a bit of a slough thus far in that department. Part of it is that I need to slow things up a little - the other end of that is the students need to pick up the pace a bit. So, in other words - if I start walking their way and they start walking mine, we’ll gain a lot of ground if we both give a little - and meet in the middle.
Also - if a student misses school OR they fall a bit behind, they need to make up that work outside of class. I RARELY ever assign homework and when I do, it’s only because the students cannot accomplish what I am asking them to do inside of the boundaries of the physical school building. Yet, if they are behind, that’s exactly what our normal classwork becomes - homework.
Speaking of homework, students will be bringing home their first homework of the year: picturing heroes. I am asking students to bring in a PICTURE of the person they consider to be their hero. Please know - this picture will be a part of a large collage in my classroom and either a STAPLE or a THUMBTACK will go through the pic. Therefore, antique, heirloom photos are not appropriate for this assignment. Also, nothing larger than 4X6”, please - we are anticipating over 100 photos, so the smaller, the better. This will be due on Friday, September 20th.
Now, a look ahead to this week: on Monday and Tuesday, we continue with Homer’s “The Odyssey - Book Nine” with a comic strip action AND an analysis of a filmed version of a text. On Wednesday, we will introduce Unit One Vocab - PART TWO and our final lesson on symbolism using “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman (sorry, Luke Combs) and the short story, “Red Roses” from our myPerspectives textbook.
We end with a lesson on TONE / DICTION / DENOTATION and CONNOTATION on Thursday and Friday. I spent some of my Sunday cutting out words for a group word sort in the afternoon while watching the Bengals fall to 0-2. So what I am telling you is that the TONE of my scissor cutting was not exactly positive during that late-game defensive pass interference on the Bengal secondary that put Butker into field goal range.
","author_name":"Jason Davidson"}