Ugh...

Last week was pretty terrible towards the end. On top of all the typical work and issues, I could not get one of my classes to pay attention and I totally misread a situation in a different class and made things worse. My 3AB class after being taught something twice, still could not answer the review questions with a couple of exceptions. I could not make them understand that they needed to pay attention because they were going to be tested on this later, so I decided to make the test more real and give them an unannounced quiz, knowing that they should have the chance to remediate by school policy. Of course to qualify for remediation, they need to have shown that they made and effort and participated in preparation. I was going to let everyone remediate as long as they tried to do well on the quiz. However, several people wrote one word besides their name on the quiz and handed it in, so they will take a zero with no chance to make it up. I can't wait to see how they take that news today. I think it did achieve the desired effect of making them snap to attention though, we'll see. In my 6B class of juniors they were choosing their years for a project and I was choosing people off the list randomly. One student got upset because someone chose his year and he got all dramatic. As I saw it, he got a lot of laughs for his performance and this inspired him to continue. It seemed entirely harmless and just good natured teasing. However, after class the girl complained about the situation, rather than speaking up while it was happening. Apparently I also missed a student videoing during class and taking pictures, not surprising in a large class. Mr. Hodge helped me deal with this particular situation by talking to the student because he was able to use previous knowledge of the student's life to help him. By the end of the day Friday I was about done in general. Then I was overly busy all weekend just to get ready for Monday.