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One Week Down, 35 To Go

I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.

So far, so good. Then again, we're all honeymooning - the students are
attentive and studious, for the most part. It's a little scary.

The class I was sure was going to torture me has so far not done so...
but I have a feeling will soon. I have a horrible habit of allowing
students to shout answers or questions at me when it's quiet and then
scolding them for not raising their hands when it's not or when I'm
lecturing. It's inconsistant and probably angers some students since
the ones asking during quiet times are "good" students and those who
aren't are the "bad". Not that I really categorize them as that, but
you'd be surprised at the number of students who do for themselves and
their classmates.

My two sophomore classes are turning into completely different preps.
One class is full of academically skillsed students, who are very
capable of working independantly. The other is a class that can't tell
me for sure what a verb is... forget about adverbs. It's a little bit
slower. I can tell already that it is going to basically be another
prep. For example, today the first sophomore class went through the
passage/class discussion on detail in about 10 minutes. They then
wrote their journal prompt/topic writing in another 10. Now what? Yup,
pull out the emergency reading response "practice" and they spent the
rest of the period reading an article from Kelly Gallagher's website
and writing their responses. Mostly they needed help on figuring out
how to add detail/elaboration to their own ideas.

The second sophomore class took about 10 minutes to go through the
entry task. Then another 12 minutes for the passage/class discussion
on detail - they did much better at identifying image detail, less on
picking up descriptive verbs. Then another 15 minutes writing their
journal responses. Oh, no... not enough time for the "practice"
article (which several would not have finished reading during that
time, let alone respond), so instead I introduced sentence
diagramming. I figure if they can't figure out parts of speech, I
might as well get them going on it now, especially before we really
get into vocab. And no one wants to more than 15 minutes on grammar
anyways.

Am I cheating the second group because they're recieving fewer writing
opportunities?

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