Great, my first day back and I make someone cry. I was reading an assessment too quickly. I must have lost that feel for how slowly you need to read to a group of low readers. I gave them a 15-item fourth grade grammar inventory, and the results were a dismal 9/15. I wonder whether these actually correspond with writing and speaking ability. We teach grammar all the time, but does knowing nouns and verbs, and being able to select the correct plurals on the multiple-choice quiz actually mean anything?
Also, as we're going to be spending a fair amount of time each day studying vocab and spelling words -- how can we individualize this? Surely some children already know these words, and some don't. Here we have an ability-grouped classroom, which many people would condemn just because it's all low-achievers, but I can already tell how tough it is for the low-achievers here, even with seven adults in the room. How can we give each child a spelling list and vocab list? and do we even want to do this? Spelling tests are ubiquitous by now, but we don't know whether the students retain what they're learning beyond Friday. And if they knew it before, why are we spending time on it?
I know I still drive my college students crazy by spending every minute of class time learning. It was a criticism on my student evals. It's my punishment for trying to practice what I preach. But how much time are we wasting shuffling around papers? with waiting for a few children to catch up to the large group? And we haven't even explained to students WHY they're taking all these pretests. I must get on that.
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