Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Snow Day, 2.0

Another snow day - time to catch up on lesson plan and grading! Yay!!!
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2 comments:

  1. AnonymousJanuary 28, 2009 at 5:48 PM

    So I've really been enjoying reading your blog. Your experiences are overall pretty close to mine as far as work with students/being behind on things. I had some teacher training before I got into the classroom; and I don't know if this is reassuring or horrifying, but it's still taken me about two and a half years to really get a handle on lesson pacing, and even then I'm often wrong. Ha.

    Anyway, just in case you need one more thing to read, I've gotten a lot of REALLY good tips about procedures that save time from "The First Days of School" by Harry K. Wong (no, really, that's his name!) and Rosemanry Wong.

    The current Thing That Helps The Most is an Absent Work binder for each class--each binder has 5 dividers marked Mon, Tues, Wed, Thurs, Fri and they live on my desk. Every day, while kids are doing seatwork or during passing period or after school if necessary, I fill out a form I made that says "Welcome Back!" at the top and then "What we did on ___ in ___ class" and lists homework collected, classwork to make up, homework assigned, worksheets needed, and special notes; I make a copy for each absent student, and stick that and the worksheets into the binder. It takes me about 5-10 minutes a day, but COMPLETELY eliminates "MS LARKIN, WHAT DID WE DO YESTERDAY/LAST FRIDAY/FOR THE LAST TWO WEEKS WHILE WAS WASN'T HERE?" from happening in the middle of class. It is AMAZING.(I stole the idea from the new English teacher at my school but I'm pretty sure she got it from Wong.)

    Anyway, idk if that's helpful to you but it's been SO helpful to me.

    In other news: hang in there!!

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  2. LinusJanuary 29, 2009 at 2:03 AM

    And what a snow day it was!

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