Several things have occurred since my last post, so let's start with the first quarter grades. Recall what I was saying about grades and weighting -- for some students, the "assignments" category is weighted too much, so much that they're getting low grades simply for missing the August introductory assignments.
Well, as it turns out, only the eighth grade classes have weighted grades -- and for some strange reason, "assignments" are weighted 40% in fourth period, but 30% in first period. There is no weighting in the seventh grade classes -- in those classes a point is just a point. (Sometimes it seems as if Math 7 and Math 8 are two separate departments, with various grading rules enforced by the teachers in each grade.)
And two fourth period students in particular were affected by the weighting in Canvas -- one guy and one girl each had received B's on the APEX quizzes (30% of the grade) and C's on the tests (30% of the grade), and yet had F's in the class because of missing August assignments. The regular teacher suggested that I should excuse these students, but it was too late -- the F's already appeared in Aeries. Fortunately, there was still time for me for me to change those grades manually in Aeries.
One seventh grader in second period had an F in Canvas, but never received a quaver progress report and thus can't be failed. He's a special ed student, and there's been a dispute with a parent -- and that's as far as I'm willing to go on this blog.
There are a few other students who are failing without getting a progress report -- mostly in fifth period Math Skills. This suggests that some students are taking advantage of me -- as soon as the regular teacher left, they started neglecting their weekly hour of ST Math. And so I'm double-checking to make sure that they are keeping up with their minutes.
And that takes us to today's lesson -- specifically the eighth grade lesson and assignments. The regular teacher helped upload the slope worksheet onto Canvas, but the Edpuzzle assignment was a problem -- the lead Math 8 teacher created this assignment, so when we log into Edpuzzle, the names of her own students appear, not ours.
Chances are that the Edpuzzle assignment will never be given to my class. There are already other activities planned for this week, including a Desmos activity. And no, the Halloween-related graphing worksheet isn't one of them. (I'm glad I didn't write about it in detail, since it won't be assigned.)
Both this class and Math 7 also have planned activities on Quizizz coming up. And that's another website that I haven't used yet. What will most likely happen tomorrow is that I'll tell the students to log in to Quizizz to see we can figure it out -- and if it works, then that's their assignment. In the meantime, I spent most of Math 8 today discussing the slope worksheet, which includes simple positive/negative slope questions ("Slope Dude"), rise over run, and slope formula questions. There's barely enough time to begin Lesson 3.2.1 on slope-intercept form -- and after all of this, I'm still not sure whether the students are actually understanding all of this.
By the way, for those of you who have heard of the raging fires here in Orange County, CA, let me say that yes, one of my students was affected today. She had just logged in to today's fourth period class for distance learning Monday when her family received orders to evacuate their home. Later this evening, she emailed me to find out what she missed -- but like many of her fellow eighth graders, she is struggling with this slope unit.
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