February, also known to students and teachers as Third Quarter, is a difficult time in the school year. Christmas is over. The weather is (usually) nowhere near warming up. We have all had enough time to get firmly settled into a rut and there is still too much of the school year left for students to necessarily be worried about pulling their grades up for report cards.
It is the teacher's responsibility, to plan for this and provide class activities that will help the students stay interested in what they are learning. In pre-algebra, this is the time of year that I really get the students demonstrating problems at the board or working on individual sized white boards as quickly as they can. My Greek 2 students make it easy for me. I have three highly motivated students in that class who love to learn and love language in general. They also enjoy the privileges that come with being upperclassmen in a very small class that can be trusted to work hard. My Theology 8 class is the one that really concerns me with regard to the third quarter slump. The architecture of the room makes it feel packed with 14 eighth graders. It is the only class this year that I have not taught before, which always makes me a little nervous about pacing. I will admit that the class typically has a set formula for how we proceed. Reading and written questions for homework followed discussions of the homework to correct it the following day. Class discussions start with the homework corrections but always expand from there. Quizzes are held on Fridays. It's very predictable. And it's utterly amazing how much the class changes when they have another kind of activity to do.
Such simple things can shake up a class. Today I had them making study guides for the first two thirds of the current chapter. It covers a great deal of material, so there are about a hundred questions for the chapter review at the end. Two of the three sections used 73 questions. The students know this now because they had five minutes to find all the questions based on the material they had read so far. Once they found the right questions, the moved around to assigned groups and teamed up to identify where in the chapter to find the answers to those questions based on the outline format their textbook uses. I gave them small blocks of time to achieve certain parts of the assignment, allowing them to decide how they got it done. Division of labor and teamwork were permitted and encouraged. I was surprised to see which students took the work seriously and showed leadership within their small groups.
I have one student in the eighth grade who is a scout. He is not just in scouts, he is a scout. If you give him a task and a team, he will lead. It was such a pleasure to watch this today. Puberty has not been easy on him and he has struggled in many ways. Today, he flourished. I need to find more ways to keep those fires burning.
I am grateful for a good day.
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