Merry Belated Christmas and Happy New Year!

Hope you guys had a great Christmas and have a happy and safe New Year!!!

Temperament Testing

Today in class (freshman academy) the students took a temperament testing called the Keirsey Sorter. The students had to answer 70 A/B answers and then it gave them a report of their personality, and learning environments. It related to some of the power tools that we learned in SURN because each report gave the student a tip for success and many of the suggestions were ideas like, "summarize the main ideas (golden lines)." "Study in groups by talking" (reciporical teaching), Write key definitions (Frayer Method). They students thought is was amazing that a test could tell them so much about themselves.

It's that time of year again...

The holidays are very stressful for everyone (parents, teachers, students) and we tend to see a lot of behavior problems around this time of year. I was out on Friday and left a very involved lesson plan with several different activities to keep them working from "bell to bell". Unfortunately my first class decided to rebel and this resulted in two fights, with the students only getting half of their work done. The rest of my classes got all of their work done, and there were no problems for the rest of the day. Of course the class that has the fights is also the class with the worst grades and lowest test scores (go figure). So what am I supposed to do? I leave them a great lesson plan (packed with literary strartegies), and they've had practice doing these types of lessons before, yet I have all of these issues. I do not need my students to fall behind when they are already struggling with getting their work done. I would love to give them extra work as punishment, but I worry that they will just refuse to do that work as well. Frustrating....
(I think we need that Christmas break in two weeks to come a little quicker so we can all recharge.)