We’ve had one other school year since I’ve been teaching, when we had finals after Christmas, however, I don’t remember the schedule being this odd. We just returned back from finals, MLK, AND a teacher workday, meaning we haven’t had a full day of class since last Monday. Yesterday was our first full day.
The good news is that my students did fairly well on the district finals. A lot of kids passed their finals who were not passing with me — my policy is to make sure you pass the entire semester if you can pass the district final because they ARE hard.
That’s other thing my district does well by the way. Our students are mobile, especially when apartment complexes are offering free rent, and can you blame their families? We’ve also tried to have a standard curriculum, but we didn’t really have the funding for it. However, we had had the district finals. By the way, one of my projects right now is to create a standard curriculum, which is going well, but seems like a daunting task. I’m on week 6 of 36 weeks!
The worse part of our schedule, is that the work ethic of my students is terrible. Even before this week, they were waiting until the last minute. Though I do think I’ve always had a group that does this, this year seems worse. However, I also have to remember I haven’t had a student load this high in years, especially when it comes to webmastering. I do not believe I’ve ever had this many webmastering students, and I just got 5 more. Two had me first semester in previous years, the others all failed the other webmastering teacher at some point.
More good news, I"ve managed to convince administration to drop Webmasteirng as an option on the choice sheet, though I bet we have to keep a section open next year for those who failed it. They really can’t come into the second semester of CS.