(Ok. I’m lagging. It IS summer after all. But I told myself I’d try to stay in the groove for the summer, and post (kinda) regularly; there are people who teach on a different schedule, and right now aren’t able to go camping for a week at beautiful Refugio Beach. And they might like some new material now and then. Though if we don’t stop the Terminator from closing our state parks, nobody will be camping anywhere.) Anyway, my last post left me holed up at the Holiday Inn in San Francisco, the day after the last day of school, studying for the CTEL. Early Saturday morning, I got to the test site at beautiful Mission High School and snaked a beauty off-street (free) parking spot. I was there an hour before reporting time, so I ate my muffin, drank my green iced tea from my clear plastic jug (no labels; could be used for cheating), and hung out in the cafeteria where they herded all of us after checking for cell phones and “any device with an on/off switch.” I half-read the misspelled posters touting the nutrition and energy that come from eating vegetables in season, grooved on the
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A few years ago, while we were reading Outsiders aloud, I was about to give them my usual “reading check” type quiz to make sure they were following along, thinking about what we’d talked about, connecting the literary terms to the examples in the book, etc. I can’t quite remember what my inspiration was (probably just to throw them for a loop like I like to do), but I decided to let them “cheat.” My quizzes on the books and stories we read are always open book, but this time I told them they could take the quiz, not only open book, but “open mouth.” I told them they could talk about the questions and answers as much as they want in any way they want, and decide however they want to, which of the answers to choose. “You can share what you know…or not. You can decide whether to heed the wisdom of the group…or not. You just can’t lie. You can’t knowingly tell everyone the wrong answer on purpose.” One class that day came up with the name Quiz for Dummies. The rest of the periods thought that was a little “mean,” so we’ve stuck with Open Mouth. [...]
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