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Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Good News

Good News! After the last blog you may have thought that things were looking awfully bleak. But, the news of my students’ demise was premature. Many of the students improved their scores on the vocabulary quiz, and some of those actually scored a 100%.
Whether this was due to actual knowledge of the words or increased neuron firing during the testing period is irrelevant. Both knowledge and Gatling gun neurons are desirable outcomes of this first foray into the lexical depths.

The students also brought out their street sweepers for the second draft of their essays. After mini-lessons concerning transitions and conclusion I was pleased to see improvement on both fronts when students revised their papers. They are successfully moving past middle school transitions like first, second, lastly, etc. The conclusion took a few steps toward synthesizing instead of summarizing. At least none of the conclusions started by saying, “in conclusion.”

In conclusion, I guess what I have been saying is that in short, my students can and will be successful this year. They are interested in more than just graduating. They want to improve themselves.

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