End of the Term

So this Thursday grades close for term 3 at our school. That means the semester is half way over, so my math students should have learned half of what they are supposed to learn in Math 3 by now. Eek! I guess what's scary is that I have no idea if they have! I don't have a strong enough understanding of the Math 3 curriculum in order to see the bigger picture. I'm not sure what the end goal is, so I'm not sure if I'm being successful with them. No wonder the kids don't find purpose in their math homework!

I'm also curious about my grades at this point. I've been doing a lot to help my students at the bottom of the class, and their grades have gone up a fair amount. By a fair amount, I mean from 40% to 60%. So I guess my question is, if a D- is passing for our school, is it a good thing that I'm being lenient to help them get their grades up, or is it harming them by teaching them that I can bend the rules? I guess there are two layers here: 1) Are their grades going up because I'm being nice or because they're actually learning and improving their math skills? 2) Is it more important for me to push them to learn their math skills, or should I be teaching them more student skill lessons about turning in work by the correct deadlines and such?

I guess I'm just still not convinced that their grades properly reflect how much they understand of Math 3, and I'm not sure how to better evaluate that. I guess it comes back to the fact that no matter what you do, grades will always be somewhat subjective because they are always somewhat based on human judgment. So I guess I'll try not to get to down on myself about it. I give gradekeepers to my students every week, so they should be aware of their grades at all times. It takes some of the responsibility off of me by placing the grades in their hands.

Also, last week was an odd week because my sophomores weren't in class because they were taking the ELA MCAS, but my juniors still had class. So I had to find activities to do with the juniors that were still productive but that didn't get them ahead of the rest of the class. Now I need to find a way to sync them back up again and keeping chugging ahead.

We've done some interesting things this past week. I stole the Broken Calculator game from a website/ the brilliance of a professor from my school. It's a computer activity where the students are given a calculator with many broken buttons. For instance, only the "2," "3," "+," "x," and "=" work, and the students are given 8 or so numbers that they have to make using only those buttons. For example, using the buttons listed above, make the number 6. That one is easy: 2x3=6. Now make 50 using those buttons. It's a little trickier, so it causes the students to really think about the most efficient methods of making different numbers besides just doing 2+3+2+3... They had a lot of fun with it too! Now I'd like to find a way to weave this back into their study of graphing inequalities with multiple constraints. We are starting a business project soon, and they need to be pretty adept at manipulating inequalities with graphing and word problems, etc. So I hope last week wasn't a waste, and I hope we can move forward effectively!