Day 91

Almost done with the semester. You have no idea how excited I am to see everything finish. I get a new set of students next week (in most of my classes). The one that I'm not too excited about is the fact that they've taken away one of my film classes and added another computer tech class. So now I'm teaching 4 computer technology classes, 1 multimedia, and 1 film class. I didn't think I was going to mind it all that much, but now that I'm thinking of it, I'm not all that excited. It'll be interesting to see how things play out now.

As for end of term/semester stuff, it is amazing what students want me to do for them. I've had so many students come up and ask if they could come in and do something for me in order to re-adjust their attendance. They want to do attendance make-up and I've said all semester that I don't do attendance make-up. That isn't something I really have to do for my students. I'm not a fan of when other teachers do it and then the students expect the rest of the teachers to do it for them as well. I don't mind being here after school and letting them work on their projects and assignments, but I'm not going to give them other work and other things to do in order for them to make up their attendance. They are the ones that should be controlling that and they should be on top of things like that, but never the less they aren't and I'm the one that they blame.

Students are funny that way. There are times that I really like being a teacher and I enjoy seeing my students and seeing what they are capable of. There are other times that I really just want to pull my hair out by the roots and yell at them to leave me alone, that I'm not in the mood to deal with them. I guess everyone has those moments though.

It was kind of interesting yesterday in my meeting. We started talking about group work and how some teachers really tend to shy away from it stating that it is too much of a hassle and "student's really don't need to do group work". Do I just think differently? I think that group work is really essential. Students need to know how to work with different personalities and deadlines and organization and people. My group work tends to work for me. I have a combination of things that I do. First, if I let them pick their groups, they know the warning that if I don't see work happening, I can disband their group and assign them to another group or make them do the project on their own. Another thing is I have a confidentiality report submitted by the students on how they think the group worked together. I also have a section for comments in case there is something that they want to say about the person or in case they want to say something about the assignment. They then get the comments back once everything has been graded, along with any comments I had to say. I mix mine in with the other student feedback, so they really don't know which are mine and which aren't. Also, if I am the one that picks their groups, I tend to mix up a lot of the personalities and not always put students with their friends. It is interesting to see the dynamic that happens when I do that. Another thing I do with group work is to just do a random pick. Either I pull the names, or I pull one name and have them chose _______ names more and that is their group. They tend to have mixed emotions about that one. Sometimes it is funny to see them "willing/wishing" their friends to pick them.

But I think I'll have more to say once tomorrow is over and I have my grades submitted. I'm not taking late work from this semester, so they have to have everything in to my by Friday at Noon. We'll see how many of them actually do that.