A highlight from this past week was counseling a student on my own during the MSP testing. The student had missed the first day of the writing and the school decided to have him do both days of writing on the same day. This would be difficult enough for most students but this student severely lacks motivation. This bothers me because the kid is very intelligent but just cannot commit to getting the job done. He and I however have built a close relationship and he believes in what I communicate to him. Halfway through his testing he had given up so they sent me down to take him for a walk and have some lunch. I let him discuss his issues with testing, motivation, and life in general. I spoke of similarities that him and I share and what he can do to overcome his situation. I don't know if his effort that day increased at all but I do know that he can come to me anytime and we can make this a long-term deal towards his success.
Something that made me think a little differently is how much students really enjoy conducting labs. These past couple of weeks with testing have left kids feeling frustrated and worn out. Each day numerous students will always ask if testing is over and if we can get back to our chemistry labs. This happens on a regular basis in seventh period after kids have apparently sat most of the day in their other classes. They want to do something and a lab definitely fills that void. It just re-affirms in me that labs are a great learning tool and is still unique to the science area.
A strategy that I want to try to implement is having students use drawings to depict a situation or process. This proved beneficial in a lesson on understanding density as it related to expansion and compression. Students volunteered to draw what they believed the air molecules to be behaving like and their drawings helped other students either reinforce what they thought or sparked a new way of viewing the concepts of expansion and compression. One way I would manipulate this would be to give each student a small dry-erase board to draw their own depiction and then show me when they are finished. In this way I can receive a lot of feedback in a short period of time.
A perplexing situation revolved around good ol' standardized testing. This week students are taking the NWEA test to show if they made improvements in math and science. When I arrived yesterday the computer-based testing had already fouled up twice resulting in chaotic classes as the lab would take too long to complete in that time. With two issues already they still decided to try it a third time and again the system froze up about 25 minutest into the testing. My teacher, who helps coordinating these tests, had to stick around to try and solve scheduling conflicts so she left me to take the class back to the room with no agenda whatsoever. It got a little chaotic with a group of boys and I was scrambling to find anything to do. With my mind blank I asked them and the whole class said, "silent ball!". Bingo, it worked like a charm. It made me realize that I need to always have a backup plan or two when everything gets thrown out the window.
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