Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Wednesday, January 13

Rose 1: A recent assignment my senior students had was to write a 3-6 minute expository essay. They were able to choose any school appropriate topic. A few students finished this project on time with no trouble and gave their speeches in class. The speeches weren't fantastic, for the most part, but my students really put the effort in, so I didn't mind. One student who was struggling with a death in his family finally gave his speech today, about four weeks late. He gave the best speech out of all of my students which was definitely not what I was expecting. He followed the directions, which my students often do not do, and he developed a very charismatic beginning to his speech that exceeded my expectations for all of my students. The best part of this was that his speech was on MMA, or mixed martial arts, which I have absolutely no interest in, but he made it interesting to me. I was so impressed!

Rose 2: In my last class of the day on B days, I have freshmen. They're currently working on an I-search paper which is sort of a watered down version of a research paper. It has been a struggle in one section but today, my students started to "get it." We started with a topic letter that gave them the chance to propose their topic. Students then moved on to an outline I had created based on the blueprint I wanted them to use for the paper. Today, I noticed a student splitting his screen so he had his outline on one side and his draft on the other side. It caught on with other students and they started to realize that the outline is made to help them write their drafts. I was happy to see real, practical learning taking place.

I hope you stopped to smell the roses today.

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