Eureka!

Here's your assessment for today:
Which of the following is most challenging to me?
(1) Delivering lessons in front of up to 25 high school students.
(2) Obsessively planning every hour of every day of our activity-filled summer.
(3) Making phone calls to the intimidating parents of our class to introduce myself.

For those of you who chose (3), you know me the best! 100%!

And guess what I did yesterday? (3) again!

And it wasn't even that bad. One girl's father was so nice and grateful. The other father I spoke to was defensive about his daughter missing class that day because she had to register for school, but otherwise nice. Whew.

I also had a Eureka! moment in a session yesterday. They presented an issue that we had all been struggling to name so for this summer. See, we were given a list of daily objectives to teach over the summer, and a couple assessments worth of questions. We were told to write lesson plans to teach the objectives only, and nothing extraneous. However, the level of the assessments were much more difficult than the level of the objectives. We were planning and executing lessons that didn't prepare students for success on the exit tickets. This is why my students were understanding the material but scoring so low.

Yesterday this problem was acknowledged officially, and we were instructed on how to increase the rigor of our objectives. I had to rewrite a couple of lesson plans (frustrating) to match the new objectives, but I did, and it felt good.

I'm not too optimistic about our Mid-term Assessment today, especially in light of yesterday's discoveries, but I can't wait to teach my awesome new lesson plans next week (vaccines! transcription! mitosis!).

Unfortunately, I learned that one of the kids involved in the fight yesterday was from the later biology class, which I subbed for, and he was expelled. He is a really smart kid and I hope he sorts out his life soon.