Tuesday!

Today, I did send a letter home. The students were given some time to reflect on how they're doing with things in here, and I had some words about grades, the effort of a lot of my students, and some other things. I would like to know that you read the letter. If you could send it back with a signature, zip me an email or a phone call, or leave a comment here, that'll be fine.

We reviewed the vocabulary words for List 6 and went over our figurative language quizzes from the other day before diving into our assessments. The students first took a benchmark assessment over poetry. They had to know about ballads, sonnets, epics, odes, and elegies as well as the types of figurative language and couplets. I don't think it was that difficult of a test; in fact, I took it and got them all right. I had mixed results with my students. In one class, I had almost half get an A. In another class, I had over half get an F. Overall, I had 32% of my students get an A on this test while 29% got an F. To me, that has more to do with the work of the students than the work of me. The students who got A's are the same ones who pay attention, participate, take notes, and do their best on the work. Yesterday, we went over the types of poetry as a class, and I could tell that there were some students who just weren't paying attention. Those are likely the same students who did poorly today. I'm giving the students the test back tomorrow, so you should ask to see how your child did.

We also took half of the vocabulary quiz. They were all old word parts today. The students can look over the words tonight to get ready for part two tomorrow. They can also correct their part one answers since I won't be grading those until Thanksgiving so that I can have something to do while the family is eating. I find that when I'm able to look busy during the Thanksgiving meal, my Uncle Chester won't keep asking me what size pants I wear or if I want to hear the story about when he threw a plum at L.B.J.

The students might have had a little bit of time to work on the Lincoln assassination reading. We'll be able to finish that up tomorrow.