Week Eight

Week eight was a very busy week, to say the least. I took on teaching full time so I now have four regular English 9 classes and one English 9 support class. East Fairmont High School participates in curriculum mapping and this system sets up what will be taught each month. This month is poetry, punctuation and persuasive essays. This week we learned about poetry terms, haiku poetry and capitalization. The students did really well writing their own haiku poetry but most needed to have a lot of coaxing to get started. I am not sure why students have an aversion to poetry but I am going to try and get them to like it during the month. I hope, at the very least, that I will be able to turn them on to one poet they can relate to. We are going to cover many different types of poems during the month and the students will be able to write their own poems in response to some of the types of poetry we read. I am excited at how well they responded this week to the poems we covered and I hope that next week will be even better.

This week we also had parent teacher conferences. It was a really great experience to be able to sit in and even comment on some of the issues. The conferences lasted from 3-6 on Thursday and parents were coming through the door constantly. Mrs. DeVault would sit down with each parent or set of parents and talk about how their student was doing in class. Most parents had a pretty good idea because they can check their student's grades daily on Edline. Some parents had not checked the website and were very surprised to learn about the grades. I like the idea of having the grades be online but I am glad that Mrs. DeVault also has the students write their grades in their notebooks so that parents can see the grades without having to have access to a computer. The conferences went well and we are hopeful that some students who were not doing well will do better this week after we talked to their parents. Sadly, only one or two parents from 7th period came so we aren't sure what we are going to be able to do about their behavior. I did not have too much trouble with them this week considering how they can act but we don't get things done like we should because I constantly have to stop teaching to ask someone to be quiet or not to throw things, etc. We have called some parents, changed the seating arrangements and given detention but it only helps for a short amount of time. Hopefully we can figure out something this week that will help them calm down.