CPS

Clicker Issues

September 20, 2010
By

I just don’t know what to make of this year’s bunch. At first, they were looking good, mainly because they were NOT the ones from last year. Oh baby, I’m glad that crowd has moved on (well most of them anyway), and now the crabby eighth grade teachers actually have something to be crabby about. Hey wait a minute! I’m one of those eighth grade teachers this year. (I keep forgetting that, eighth grade or no, they are still very much in junior high. But they try to remind me almost daily that they can be just as out to lunch and gluey as seventh graders. But with attitude.) The seventh grade noobs were still looking good as I was checking out our new subscription to DataDirector, and their state test scores. Less than 20% below proficient, as defined by the state. The year before, that number was closer to 30%. Ok so far. They all had a planner on opening day. Oh yeah. We gave those out on that first day this year. Well, all but two of them still have it now. The sit and stare phase lasted much longer than usual, which is usually a sign of

Read more »

Workshop?

February 19, 2010
By

Sometimes when you’re milking a joke for more laughs, it’s easy to, well, go a bit further than you intended… I think this one might haunt me for awhile. The CPS clickers have a feature where if a question has, for example, only two choices (as in a T/F question), and the kid clicks a choice beyond A or B, the screen shows a red X for that kid, indicating that (s)he has clicked something that is not one of the choices. Now remember, seventh graders are the epitome of the expression, “monkey see, monkey do.” Once one of them starts “red x’ing,”  more than half the class is at it. (Attention EInstruction: make it a feature that every time, after the first couple, a kid gets the red X, it makes the answer incorrect. Maybe even have some sort of thing where it takes a point away for every red X?) For some of them it’s their “thing,” so once they’re done, the screen is a sea of flashing red X’s. (There are also kids, who when they’re finished early, have races to see who can click from one to the end more quickly.) Over the course of time,

Read more »

Everybody’s Special Now. (EInstruction Rules!)

February 18, 2010
By

I’ve had my clickers for three years, and I use them almost every day, and they’re starting to show their age. This year’s crowd also seems to be dropping them a whole lot more (“Ten cents!“), and I still haven’t replaced any of the batteries, so I guess it’s sort of a miracle they’re working at all. With the constant dropping, the batteries have been shaking loose more often, and that means I have to hear the plaintive, “My cliiiiiiicker doesn’t wooooooooork.” “Sounds like operator error to me. Bring it here…” And I have to use my little jeweler’s screwdriver to take off the battery cover, and adjust the batteries back into place. Over the past few months, the threads have been stripping on some of the battery covers, making the battery problem worse, and thus there have been more clicker “issues” and more whining. So I called EInstruction and asked if they could just send me some battery covers and screws. I could have my servants service all the injured clickers, and we’d be back in business for minimal cost. The service rep put me on hold for a few minutes. When she returned, she tells me that those

Read more »

Near Catastrophe

January 7, 2010
By

Today I came much closer to a catastrophic tech failure than I’m used to. And it happened live in class. Now, as my loyal readers may have guessed, I don’t have many tech failures, beyond finicky overhead bulbs and such. (In fact, I get to play the Fonz quite a bit with my overhead. It must have a loose connection to the bulb, because if I’m a bit too forceful in my pointing with my pen, the bulb goes out. So then I whack it a certain way on the side, and it works again. I bat about .900 with the restoring whack, and I give the thumbs up, but none of them know who the Fonz was. They are still slightly awed in their seventh grade way. It’s even better when I do the backside kick to my class computer – it’s on the floor under my center table – to quiet the occasionally noisy cooling fan. They love that one. ) First, I am mostly religious about backing up data. My CPS databases are on a flash drive which is backed up to my space on the school server (which is supposedly backed up nightly) and every now and then

Read more »

Playing God (Part One)

December 16, 2009
By
Playing God (Part One)

I’m out of action for family bidness tomorrow and Friday, so today was my last day of 2009.  I accidentally leaked the info early to one period, (the girls’ club) so they brought snacks today and sorta forced me into a “party” of sorts. I have never been able to resist a good snickerdoodle, or two, or ten. So that meant that I had to shorten things up in the other periods too…so it was sort of a nutty day today. But in the 2 1/2 days I had to work with this week… (Aside: I’m breaking a perfect record of never having showed a movie in class, ever in 20 years. But this time I’m having the sub roll the cheesy Outsiders movie tomorrow and Friday while I’m gone. They’ve been begging for weeks, and I’ve been telling them to “wake up” from the dream, but this will be my little Christmas present to them.) …we did a little Giver epilogue and what-have-you. Yesterday, we discussed a few “literary” type questions. #4. The denouement (resolution) of  The Giver is when Jonas slides down the hill on the sled with Gabriel.  a) True  b) False Trick Question! FALSE! There is

Read more »

Random Featured Post

“Do you love me?” (Also: Weird “Week”)

Wotta “week.” Considering how tired I am, I can’t believe it was only a three-day week – for some reason we had a 4-day weekend for Veterans’ day. And I done clean forgot that I was supposed to give the “District Benchmark Test #1″ (that’s a whole ‘nother post) by Friday. So we spent Wednesday darkening ovals to generate data for the district, AND there was a “multi-media” assembly that, amid the rock and rap, touted the beauty of trust and honesty (also: don’t do those things which I obviously can’t mention, because ads for them started appearing here). AND, yesterday was “parent visitation day.” Whole lotta scare quotes today too. Usually I get a pretty good turnout for these parent visitation days (it sounds like a Catholic holiday). Our previous principal (our present principal is an FNG, both to the job of principal AND to our school) instituted these as a sort of PR for parents. Many parents of ms’ers are more than a little leery of sending their little angels to the big bad junior high. (You should have seen the reaction a few years ago when the district proposed making our school 6-8. OMG. You’d have thought [...]

more -->


Mr. Coward has been teaching on the beautiful central coast of California since 1989.

Archives

May 2012
M T W T F S S
« Apr    
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
28293031  

Recent Comments

Links

Privacy Policy

Tags

cartoons Charlotte Doyle Class Activities clickers CPS CTEL Flashback grammar high school idiosyncrasies irony Mailbag Me mechanics middle school teaching Monsters on Maple Street Moodle online learning oral reading Outsiders CHapter 5 Outsiders Chapter 7 RaffleKing Ray Bradbury Reading Richard Cory Seventh Grade Behavior Stories of Seventh Grade substituting Teaching Teaching Tips teaching with technology teaching with technology teaching writing Technology techology testing The Earth Men The Giver The Midwife's Apprentice The Outsiders Tips Tips for teachers Tom Sawyer Wiki Writing