Today is the first day of Daylight Saving Time. It is unquestionably Mrs. Dull’s least favorite day of the year. For her that lost hour of sleep is a thing she can never get back and it feels like its been unfairly taken, the same reaction you have as a kid to dropping an ice cream cone on the ground.
For me, it’s one of the unmistakable markers of the coming of spring. Truth be told, I’ll be dragging tomorrow morning too but there’s a 7:00 sunset scheduled for Monday of spring break and that re-energizes me for the last 9 weeks of school. I’m very Vitamin D-responsive. I’m more motivated to get my dogs and myself out for evening walks when it’s light out later. I’ll put the patio chairs back out and spend some quiet time sitting outside after dinner. It’s mentally and physically healthy for all of us.
Everybody out there trying to get what they need, and some folks need something different. For Cath, we’ll balance out the sleep deprivation some night soon with an impromptu pizza dinner on the beach at sunset.
My district revealed its testing numbers a few weeks ago. There was good news and bad news: we are improving but still lagging the state-wide average. And breaking down our students’ I-Ready and PSAT results, we have got significant work to do.
Our principal shared out the results at last month’s faculty meeting, and added a note of guidance: if we have a large portion of our students reading at well below grade level, and we are giving text-based assessments, we can’t be too surprised that our students are struggling grade-wise in our classes. His suggestion: can we consider and implement other ways we can give our students to show us what they know?
Amen. Preaching to the choir right there.
I’m a long-time project-as-assessment guy. Especially when Algebra II gets weird.
Last week we finished triangle similarity and took a Desmos quiz on the topic, with so-so results. I followed it up with the Capture-Recapture goldfish lab and made that a quiz grade. It checks plenty of my favorite boxes: collaborative, crunching numbers, real-world application, a quick snack while mathing. They are after all The Snack That Smiles Back™.
If you want the definitive write-up and docs, Julie Reulbach is my go-to. And you’ll probably dig the BBC video that serves as the hook.
There was some quality math on display and plenty of productive table-talk, and a little competition (which group came closest to the actual number of goldfish in the bag) never hurts.
They showed me they can set up and solve proportions, which is a major objective for the unit. That was my motivation for making it a quiz grade. As a former colleague of mine likes to say, “you learn it, you earn it”. For many of my students, it helped balance out their score on the more traditional quiz. Which seems eminently fair to me, and is aligned with the philosophy our school leadership is espousing.
Win-win. I can teach to the test, or I can teach to the student.
Kind of an easy decision, as I understand it.
Now let’s make it throught this last week of the quarter, enjoy spring break, light the Weber and bathe in the soft light of a late-March sunset.
Tweaking For No Reason 