Abandon ship!

Last week was a short week due to conferences. So that meant that we had to get everything we normally get done in five days- done in four. This also meant that we had a lot of assessments on Thursday- which made the students rather unhappy with me! I would have been unhappy too if I had three assessments in the  morning and one in the afternoon- but it was what it was.
On Wednesday I had tried to assess them in their math. We had been working on coins for over a week and I was confident that they would do well. HOWEVER when I passed out the assessment and was walking around looking at their papers, I realized that I had not been clear to them about something in the assessment. The longer I walked around and thought about it, the more I realized we needed to abandon ship and reteach what was missed. I had looked over the assessment of course before we handed it out, but to be honest, I had made the same mistake my students were making- which was an obvious sign that I needed to pull those assessments and reteach. So that's exactly what I did. I had them put their pencils down and took the assessments. Then I retaught what the confusion was about and told the students we would assess the next day. Unfortunately, that meant an additional assessment on Thursday, but it was better to do that than to have them not do well on the money assessment when they did indeed know the material!

I had a student make me a necklace last week. It was a very sweet gesture and it made me smile like nothing in a long time! He said that he was playing in his mom's craft stuff and wanted to make RM and I something. He took some pearl string and some apples... yes, you can imagine what it was like :) He taped the pearl string together to make a necklace (scotch tape of course) and then taped two apples onto the necklace. The picture I have of it is crude- but you get the jist of it. Of course the apples fell off within a couple hours (they were taped onto the necklace) I had said how much I loved the necklace and was wearing it- so when the apples started jumping ship, I had to fix the problem. I got a paper clip and attached the apple to the paper clip and then that to the necklace. My neck was itching like MAD from where the scotch tape was holding the necklace together, but I was not about to take it off.

I wore that necklace all day- and when it came home it was hung in my office proudly so that every time I look at it I will think of that kind gesture and my sweet class from student teaching.