In the eighth grade classes, I continued with the lesson on comparing functions. This is an introduction to the idea of slope as the rate of change, including finding slope using the rise and run on a graph.
There's no sugarcoating this one -- this lesson is a struggle. It takes the entire block period today to get through the lesson in first period. Fortunately, since students stay in first period for today, I have them attempt Quiz 3.1.5 today. Most of the students who try it need two or three attempts just to pass it by getting three out of five correct. Indeed, three students proceed to Lesson 3.2.1 on slope-intercept form even though I tell them not to (once they start it, they must finish it). Of those three, two of them get perfect scores on Quiz 3.2.5 while the other at least matched his Quiz 3.1.5 score (and this is without getting the actual lesson).
I suspect that this is because today's lesson involves graphs, which are always tricky. Of course, graphs are also related to slope-intercept form, but this is more about plugging in values to the equation y = mx + b, whereas today's rise and run questions involving inspecting the graph directly.
Recall that on Monday, the eighth grade teacher leader suggested an Edpuzzle activity and a graphing worksheet that might help the students out. I'm still trying to figure out how to assign these, so I didn't do so for first period -- but after seeing the students struggle, I might make more of an effort to set up these assignments to help fourth period practice the graphs.
On one hand, I'm hoping to get through Lesson 3.1.x today and Lesson 3.2.x on Monday, thus setting up the rest of the week for another lesson suggested by my colleagues. I don't want to give it away in today's post, but it has something to do with Halloween (and graphing lines in slope-intercept form). Of course, what matters the most is making sure the students are learning. Rushing through a difficult lesson just to get to an assignment in time for Halloween is not teaching.
Then again, I might not have time to set up Edpuzzle anyway, because I'm swamped with grades. The grades have been finalized in Canvas -- well, most of them have. For some strange reason, the letter grades for my second period Math 7 class are all missing. And so I must enter them manually -- this is no biggie, since I must enter work habits and citizenship grades anyway. (By the way, I maintain my tradition today of showing the students my own grades from back when I was a young middle school student.)
I must also manually enter D- grades for students who have F's but never got any "in danger of failing" notice at the first quaver progress report. Most of these students are in fifth period Math Skills -- they likely tried to take advantage of my lack of access to STMath/Dreambox and thought that they could avoid logging in 60 minutes. The other student with a D-/F grade is a fourth period Math 8 students. But I notice that what's holding his grade down is -- the early August opening assignments.
I'll keep this post brief since I have lots of grades to fill in. As I move from the blogging part of my week to the tweeting part, expect a tweet about the next chapter of Eugenia Cheng very soon.
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