Monday, February 28, 2011

Small Successes

Today I gave my Geometry kids their first test.

I was pretty nervous.

Turns out they did great! 10 out of 13 passed it, and the other three successfully revised their answers to come up with a passing test.

The best part was as I was grading one students' test... we'll call him J. J is a very quiet student. He's had to reteach a number of lessons so far. He doesn't often have the answer when I call on him in class. I really didn't know how his test was going to go down.

So J was sitting at the table waiting to get the thumbs up that he'd passed or to get his paper handed back to him. I graded. Correct, correct, correct... he only missed two questions on the whole thing, but he made up for it by correctly answering some of the difficult extra credit questions I'd thrown in. In the end, he got 106%, the highest score of anyone else in the class. And I'm not even kidding, I was just about ready to start tearing up when he broke into this huge grin when I showed his test to him. And when he left the classroom, I saw him stop by Michelle's desk to tell her the good news.

Sigh. Why can't it always be like that?

Algebra takes their first test on Wednesday. Really not liking how it's looking for them. Out of 14 students, 6 show up consistently, and once we get through chapter one, it's going to be really hard for the other students to catch themselves up. Big bummer.

But J got 106%! I'm going to focus on that for tonight!

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