Wednesday and Thursday

Well, softball and chess club certainly have me busy these days. I apologize for the lack of daily posts.

We're working on our research rough drafts now. Some of the students, as I mentioned the other day, are ill-equipped. They got their notes, topics and topic categories, and source sheets back yesterday. I lumped it all into a grade called "Research" which is out of 100 points. It's a big chunk of grade because we put a lot of time into it. Or, to be more accurate, some of the students put a lot of time into it. As the scores might indicate (some scores as low as 30 or 40 out of 100), some students have wasted their time, not paid attention to the way the research and note-taking was supposed to be done, or were unorganized and lost things. So I really don't see how some students will be able to put a research paper together, especially one without plagiarizing. We reviewed on Wednesday about how to use parenthetical citation to distinguish between our own ideas and the ideas from our sources. If the students failed to document the sources as they took notes, something I reminded them every single day to do, they will most likely not be able to parenthetically cite. And if they can't parenthetically cite, they are plagiarizing. Luckily for them, it's still a learning process at this level. High school and college? They'll fail automatically and maybe even be expelled for plagiarism.

The research rough draft, by the way, is due next Tuesday. That's April 12th, the same day the students were supposed to turn a book project in. I went ahead and pushed the independent reading thing (probably a book report) to the following Tuesday.

We're continuing to take tests on our old vocabulary word part lists. We did List Five Thursday, and the students are still writing the ones they miss five times each and making a word part picture. Some of them are getting that work in; others are choosing not to do it.

Here are the word parts we've covered over the last two days:

emia is "blood" like anemia and leukemia
-ase is "enzyme" like a bunch of words that end in -ase that they'll never use
dys is "bad" like dyslexia, dysfunction, and dysentery
chlor is "green" like chlorine (the 17th element on the periodic table; it's named for its color) and chlorophyll
epi is "on" or "over" like epidermis, epicenter, and epidemic
-be is "life" like microbe and anaerobe (something that can live without air)
bon is "good" like bonbons (yum!), bona fide, the old-fashioned word bonny, bonus, and bonanza
exo is "out" (same as ex actually) like exoskeleton, exorbitant (like gas prices!), and exotic
erythro is "red" like erythrocytes (red blood cells)
im is "not" (like in and il) like in impatient, impolite, immobile and a bunch of other words

Five more to go for List Twelve. We'll test next Friday. That'll be a real test, and the students will have ALL the old tests with ALL the word parts and ALL their meanings and NO excuse not to study a little bit.