I forgot to do my homework

Hmmm…I seem to have neglected this blog for nearly two months. Oops.

Today was the last teaching day of the calendar year. Everyone must report tomorrow, though it’s only for a Christmas assembly and an early dismissal.

AP Calculus ended 2010 on a positive note. We talked about the first derivative test when reasoning from graphical or tabular data, and not only did the majority of the class do well when presented with old AP exam questions that clearly stated “This is the graph of f’, not the graph of f”, those who didn’t quickly figured out why they were wrong. From time to time, I ask my class the same question one of my grad school professors asked us — “What’s the most common wrong answer?” In grad school, it was useful for us to think about the misconceptions students would have for a specific problem, as those usually indicated some more profound lack of understanding. In my classes, I think it’s useful in two ways — primarily as a way of checking understanding and secondly as a form of test prep. The same students who gave the common wrong answers originally were the same ones who explained why their answers were the most common incorrect ones — they mistook the graph of the derivative for the graph of the function. Hopefully those students will be more careful about what they read in future problems.

I also told the calculus group that they were over a week ahead of the students from last year. This was meant to be a bit of positive reinforcement, and I believe it was effective, if only because of the surreptitious fist bump I glimpsed.

The geometry classes ended 2010 on a more mixed note. I had to lay into them a bit about not practicing the material through homework, and I got two very different sets of reactions. The students in the earlier period laughed, made jokes about one another, or complained about having to do homework. The students in the later period got very quiet and somewhat bashful.

As we begin the new calendar year, I am going to stop stressing myself out by checking homework for completion every day. Right now, homework is not factored into the report card grade, and I am not changing that. In the past, I took points off for missing homework and that didn’t get me much more than copied homework or half-assed work with things like a list of problem numbers and a list of answers. No way I’m returning to that. Instead, I’m going to make fully completed homework a strict requirement for reassessment. Today, I put together a few SMART Board slides to convey my vision of what well-done homework looks like (with captions ranging from “EXCELLENT!” to “UTTER CRAP!”). On our first day back in January, I will discuss these with my classes and see what they have to say. I imagine that very little will change in terms of frequency of afterschool visits and students who visit me.