Day 9

January 8, 2010

 

Day 9:

 

             Yokwe! Today is Friday! I never thought I’d be so anxious for the weekend so soon here. Also, we’ve been here a week now, it feels like we’ve been here like three weeks. Well, today I gave my students a quiz on subject, verb and preposition on one side and then the present progressive form on the other side. I tried to make this quiz as easy as I could for these kids. My goal was to give them something easy so they could all get good grades, that way they’d see that they could get a good grade and therefore their motivation and confidence would hopefully go up. So here’s the quiz I gave them in simplified form. On the first side there were three sections: the first was the subject, the second was the verb and the third was the preposition. Underneath the name line on the quiz I wrote: Subject = person, place, thing performing the action; verb = action, preposition = direction of the action. Then I gave them five sentences: James swims along the beach; They crawled into the taxi; We climbed up every tree in Majuro; You sleep next to a light; and I jumped into bed after the movie. Those are the only sentences for the whole quiz. I repeated those sentences for each sentence. So they were to underline the subject in the first section. Then they were to circle the verb in the second section. Lastly, they were to cross out the preposition. Mind you, I’ve used the same sentence for all three sections. If it were me, I would have known that if I underlined “we” as the subject in the first section, then I probably shouldn’t circle “we” as the verb or the preposition. Well, it’s clear that these kids don’t think like me. There were a few kids who did very well on the first part but for most of the class they didn’t get it. The part that messed up most of them was the preposition. But the part that got me was that they would cross out a word that they had already crossed out so as to say that climb is the verb and the preposition.

            When we were preparing to come over here one of the things they warned us of was the variation of intelligence within a classroom. I got my first taste of that today. There were about five or six students who finished with a 13 or 14/15 on the first side. And then there were some who got 3/15 on the first side.

            But before I get into the grades I’ll explain the back side of the quiz. That section was about the Present Progressive which we had gone over the day before. We had devised a formula to use when making the present progressive: subject + “be” + verb + “ing”. I wrote this formula on the top of the paper. Then I used the same five sentences in simplified form to change: James swims; They crawled; We climbed; You sleep; and I jump. Earlier in the week we had looked at simple two-word sentences like this and dissected them into subject and verb. We then agreed that subject + verb = sentence. So they had seen these before and they knew that “I” is the subject and “jump” is the verb. I did that very example in class on Wednesday. I THOUGHT, with the subject and the verb given (I jump) and the formula written on the page, they would only have to figure out which form of “be” (am, is, are, was, were, be, being, been) to use. And since it’s the present progressive they would only have to use “am”, “is” and “are” which is all we looked at Thursday. I feel somewhat better about that section because for the most part they did well. The mistakes I saw were sentences like, “I am start” or “I is starting”. Those mistakes are minor, I can fix those problems; as long as the kids understand that an “ing” is needed or a “be” is needed I can fix which one they choose.

            I gave the quiz to my third period class and they spent about 40 minutes of the 55 finishing it up. After the test was over they did a good job of sitting in their seats and waiting for the bell. I didn’t mind if they talked amongst themselves as long as they weren’t too loud or out of their seats. I started looking over the quizzes then but wasn’t grading them because I didn’t have a red pen. Between classes I got a red pen from the office and started grading my third period quizzes while fourth period was taking theirs. I got pretty upset at the fact that the class did so poorly. The average score was a 13.8/20-69%. It’s passing. Should I just be content with a passing grade? I’m not if I should be. Nine of the 28 students got 18/20 or better. That’s good news. I’d like to know how those nine students performed before I got there though because if they were high achieving students before, then I have less to be proud of. That’s still good news though. The bad news? Nine of the students got 10/20 or worse. Those are the ones I need to worry about. But then the problem arises where I don’t want to tailor my lesson plans to the slower students and not challenge the higher achieving students. That’s why it’s nice to have two teachers in the classroom. Terry disappears when I’m teaching though, so I’ve got to figure out how to assist both all by me onesy.

            Before the fourth period quiz started I clarified the directions by writing subject on the board, verb with a circle around it, and preposition crossed out.  I had also noticed on the backside of the quiz that I made a mistake in my examples. I put “they crawled” and “We climbed”. A few of the common responses were “They are crawleding” or “We are climbeding”.  I see my mistake and considering the way I structured the test and the formula I wrote on the page, I gave them credit for understanding how to apply the formula to the given sentence. For fourth period I wrote on the board to change crawled to crawl and climbed to climb. It took me the whole period to grade the tests from third period. I decided not to even look at the quizzes from fourth period. Hopefully they did better!

            After fourth period I went to the high school for gospel choir rehearsal. We finished “Don’t Cry” and started another song, I forget the name but it has some really fun parts in it. This song stretches my voice a lot more. I wish we did vocal warm-ups before singing because I know I can hit higher notes but I just haven’t warmed up or conditioned my voice for doing so in quite a while. After rehearsal we finished up auditions in the library. We had called back the people that we decided we wanted to see again in particular roles as determined by the late night picture-looking fiasco that stole an hour of sleep from me. Sometime during auditions I realized that the National championship game was on. I did the math in my head and confirmed that it was late night Thursday on the east coast (it was 2p.m. Friday here). So Derek and I had planned to go work out after auditions anyway, and there’s a TV in the gym at the resort. So we taxied to the resort and got there just as the teams were going into the locker room for halftime. We got a good workout in and watched the third quarter of the game. We went to the bar to watch the fourth quarter. Congratulations to the Tide! The horns played well for the third quarter and the first part of the fourth but not having the National POY threw off the offensive rhythm too much. Congrats to Mark Ingram for hoisting the Heisman and the National Championship trophy in the same year. As a sophomore.

            After the game we waited around for the skipper’s meeting. There’s a yacht race on Sunday and the skippers, as they are called, always take a few extra people to help man their boats on the water. We had caught wind of this and went to the meeting to see if we could get on a boat. Afterwards, we planned to have dinner at the resort. Well, the skippers meeting was running long and we were all hungry, on top of that it didn’t look like there were as many boats as usual so the demand for man power wasn’t very high. We decided that we would go get dinner and not worry about the boat race. I don’t think any of us got on a boat. Eric has sailed before and was told to show up on Sunday and see if anyone could use him.

            Friday there is a Mexican buffet at the resort so I got that being that homemade tacos are my favorite meal. It’s not quite homemade but it was pretty close. They had a choice of ground beef, shredded beef, chicken, tuna and shrimp. I got shrimp, ground beef and chicken mixed. It was really good!! We also drank a bottle of wine. Make that two bottles of wine. When that ran out I was on a beer run to the bar when I saw some of the Dartmouth grad students and some of the World Teach people. Malcolm was one of the Dartmouth folk. Malcolm graduated in 2009 and was a defensive end on the football team so we’ve known each other for a while. (Funny side note, Malcolm went to Walton High School in Marietta, GA which is the same town that my best friend Caleb’s uncle is from. His name is Uncle Ralph. The first time I met Uncle Ralph he mentioned Malcolm and Andrew Dete as being from his town and both playing football at Dartmouth. So it was just interesting that he’s in the Marshalls also and we have a hometown connection.)  Well I had a drink with Malcolm and the others and ended up spending the rest of my time at the resort with the grad students. I had met most of them but had only interacted with most of them in passing so it was good to meet some other people on the island. They all wanted us to go out and party with them but we hadn’t really planned to go out, I still had my workout clothes on and they were going to the one place on the island that we were specifically told NOT to go to. Also, I have Skype dates in the morning with people and so I wanted to be completely coherent and available for those. So, I came back to the apartment around 10:15 and passed out.