Two of the classes are eighth grade classes and two are seventh grade classes. This time, all classes have the same assignment -- and by now, do I even need to say what it is? Of course, it's the same old persuasive essay.
As usual, an aide is in charge of most of the classes, so there's no "Day in the Life" today. As always, middle school periods rotate, and today the rotation actually starts with fourth period (which is the same as my conference period).
It seems as if these days, almost every class I've subbed in is English, and in almost every English class (whether it's gen ed or special ed) it's the same persuasive essay. After writing about this essay so often in my January and February posts, now's a good time to explain how exactly this essay works in this district.
Apparently, this persuasive essay is considered to be a "Performance Task." The seventh grade topic is reality TV, and the eighth grade topic is violence in movies. In both grades, the students should make a claim as to whether their respective entertainment is harmless or harmful to youths their age.
The persuasive essay unit spans all the way from New Year's Day to President's Day. They spend the first few weeks reading articles to find evidence for their claim. Then this week, they type up and submit their essays in Google Classroom. While students could have discussed their evidence with each other and the teacher earlier, once the essay begins it's considered to be a test, and so all students must be silent. The deadline is tomorrow -- and then Thursday, the last day before the four-day President's Day weekend, is for grading the essay.
All English teachers need a sub that day since they'll all be at the district office grading essays. As it turns out, I'm already signed on as the sub for today's teacher. She's out today because she's a special ed teacher (for meetings, etc.), and she's out Thursday because she's an English teacher.
By the way, I'm not sure whether students not in middle school have this essay to write. I do sort of recall hearing about an essay a week ago Friday -- the last time I subbed in high school. It's possible that only the testing grades had an essay to write (high school juniors, and third grade and above in elementary school).
I was considering counting this as a multi-day assignment (today and Thursday). Then I'd post "A Day in the Life" today since I like to provide you readers more details for multi-day assignments even when they're special ed or non-math classes. But I see no point in saying "the students wrote their essays in Google Classroom" over and over. I might even do "A Day in the Life" on Thursday, since that's grading day (so the students clearly won't be writing essays that day).
The day begins with conference period, but I must cover a few minutes in another classroom again for a late-arriving teacher. As it turns out, it's the same special ed room I visited last Friday.
Since I'm returning to today's class on Thursday -- Valentine's Day -- it's a great time to do my usual holiday pencil and candy incentive. The best eighth grade and seventh grade classes today (which mostly means remaining silent during the Performance Task) will get their reward on Thursday.
The aide and I choose sixth period to be the best eighth grade class and second period to be the best seventh grade class. The regular teacher and aide allow some guys in each grade to switch periods (due to a previous agreement with the history teacher), and -- you guessed it -- those are the most talkative students.
Indeed, one eighth grader who switches from sixth to first period is so talkative that it almost looks like sabotage -- he gets first period to respond to him, so that first period loses the Valentine's reward and his own sixth period class wins it! The aide assigns him a lunch detention and informs me that he shouldn't receive a reward if he attends sixth period on Thursday. Then this repeats itself with the seventh graders -- the talkative guy in third period is officially enrolled in the second period class!
There are 17 eighth graders and 11 seventh graders to whom I owe the reward, so this gives you an idea of the class sizes today. (This might be reduced to 16 and 10 if we leave out the "saboteurs.")
If you're tired of hearing about the persuasive essays, let me reassure you that once we get past President's Day, you won't have to hear about them again. They will have been completed and graded by then.
Lesson 10-9 of the U of Chicago text is called "The Surface Area of a Sphere." In the modern Third Edition of the text, the surface area of a sphere appears in Lesson 10-7.
But there are two problems here. The first is that in past years, I rearranged the lessons so that Lesson 10-9 was taught close to Easter. (This was close to -- but not exactly on -- April Fool's Day both years.) And so my old Lesson 10-9 worksheet made a reference to Easter and "Spring Spheres." So instead of the holiday worksheet, today I'm posting an alternate activity based on both Exploration Questions 22 and 23 from Lesson 10-9.
This is what little I wrote last year about today's activity:
- From the U of Chicago text: calculate the surface area of the earth. Then compare the area of the United States and other countries to that of the entire earth.
Both two years ago and three years ago, I rearranged the lessons. Three years ago, I added two lessons from different chapters to the Chapter 10 Test. Then two years ago, I dropped not only the extra lessons, but Lessons 10-8 and 10-9 on spheres as well. On review day I posted the first worksheet from the previous year, which left out all of the non-Chapter 10 questions as well as some, but not all, of the sphere questions.
This is what I wrote in past years about today's worksheet. Again, I referred to the Easter holiday, which was a huge part of why I changed the chapter order from 2015 to 2016:
You may notice that today's blog entry is called "Review for Chapter 10 Test." At this point you're probably wondering -- how can there be a Chapter 10 Test already? After all, we haven't covered the surface area or volume of a sphere yet!
The problem, of course, is that next week is spring break. Chapter 10 is long, and the Easter holiday ends up splitting the chapter. This is actually a domino effect caused by Pi Day falling on Monday -- I wanted to cover pi -- part of Lessons 8-8 and 8-9 -- on Pi Day Monday, so we didn't start Chapter 10 until Tuesday. So that ended up pushing back Lessons 10-8 and 10-9 on the sphere.
We know that the formulas in Chapter 10 are hard for students to remember -- that is, after all, why the U of Chicago text devotes a full lesson, 10-6, just for remembering formulas! So imagine how much harder the formulas will be to remember when we have a week of spring break separating the start of Chapter 10 from its end!
And so I decided to declare this week to be the end of the unit and give a test this week. This is the same rationale for the Early Start Calendar -- we want to test the students before they have a chance to forget the material over the vacation weeks.
2019 update: Even though today shouldn't be an activity day, I'm keeping the mini-activity because it's something light to do when the emphasis should be on the review worksheet. If you want, you could add some more review questions.
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