Okay, this week’s reflection is all orchids, and it’s not because everything went well, because it didn’t…
Scott McLeod on Dangerously Irrelevant asks about adult convenience vs. what’s best for the child. In my comments there I turned it into a cross tab, and talked about the combination of doing a lesson that is both inconvenient for you and not effective for the students. I opined that sometimes when you are trying something new, you take the risk of this occurring. That is what happened to me last week. I am doing a very ambitious unit project with my students that involves them planning a cross-country trip. I was trying to teach them how to research plane fares and rental vehicle rates. I did screencasts to show them how to do this. I made up a spreadsheet on Zoho, for them to add the pricing to. It was all for naught. Our school connections were to slow for the screencast, and the kids didn’t get it who did manage to see it.

I will have to sit one-by-one with the recorders for each of the groups and show them how to do this. It points up the limits of screencasts with elementary students, not to mention the need for more bandwidth in my district.  I’m not labeling this an onion though, because I have to try new and unique things, so it’s just back to the drawing board.

Behaviorally, the class is doing better, mostly because they are sitting silently for the first two hours of school doing state testing. The state in it’s infinite wisdom is poised to eliminate testing of second graders.  This is a good thing, but the post and article don’t mention that districts, at their expense, have the option of testing down to grade one. When I taught in Oakland, California, they did this. What was laughable was that because kindergarten is not mandatory, students would start first grade never having held a pencil and be expected to do a bubble test by the end of the year. I always thought the money would be better spent on making kinder mandatory myself.