Quiz? What Quiz?

I am completing quizzing students at BASIS and am starting to administer quizzes to students at Immaculate Heart this week. It's interesting how much the students react to quizzes about information they have just learned, believe me there was a lot of complaining going on in some of these classes. Most students did very well on the initial quiz, even though they just learned the information a few days prior to the quiz. In three weeks I will be giving the students the final quiz, and it should be interesting to see how the students retain the information after not seeing that specific type of problem for a few weeks.

Monday afternoon was great as a new topic surfaced which is going to be beneficial to my research. Apparently there was a lesson covered in both curricula on adding/subtracting Rational Expressions that I overlooked previously, so now my Algebra I research is going to be much more complete. Luckily, all of the teachers at both schools were willing to work with my last minute change of topic in those classes. Now, hopefully I should have enough data to make an informed analysis of the Saxon math curricula and the "traditional" block-style teaching method used in most math classrooms.

Another interesting thing about working with teachers are the intellectual conversations held in the realm of the unknown, the teacher's lounge. Along with many discussions about my research and what I hope to find, other topics such as "what it takes to be a teacher" and "what do state guidelines really do to the school system" are quite interesting. Through these discussions I've seen that it does take preparation to be a teacher and that people can not just come in off of the street and teach, well teach effectively. Also, it is interesting how government officials are making new requirements for certain courses that may not necessarily correspond with the actual material covered in that course. Anyways, the point of this is that the teacher's lounge is an interesting place where I have gotten a lot of advice from other teachers about my research.

By the way, in my next post I should have some pictures of the school and the awesome teacher's lounge (including the amazing view from the teacher's lounge).