My school district has a funky midwinter break. Instead of President's Day week off, we have the Thursday and Friday before Pres. Day off. We then get the holiday off, and are back at it on Tuesday. As a whole, I'm excited for the break. I've got lots to do, and some sleep to catch up on.
We got a bunch done during the short week, but yet didn't make a dent in the content that needs to be covered. Why the running in place? Well because of our current events summaries. Backing up to the Super Bowl, I sat down to read 60 summaries of news events written by my kids (52-3 if you subtract kids who forgot their articles). The summaries just weren't of the quality that the group can produce. In fact, the words I would use to describe the effort would be: thoughtless and lazy.
Each rotation got a chance to hear some of the student work, from sentences that don't make sense to seeing sight words misspelled (ie precedent oboma, priuseos). They also heard work that was significantly over grade level, ie plagiarized ("Hey that sounds like the author of my article!"). I did so carefully, not naming names and allowing kids to keep their dignity. But you can bet that everyone was embarrassed with the quality of work to some degree. Usually I'll let a misspelling or an awkward sentence slide, but the number of careless errors littering the papers was alarming (lacking periods, no capitalization, fragments, misspelling names from the title, etc).
So we re-did them. I re-taught how to find a main idea, how to craft a main idea into a sentence that makes sense, as well as how to put it all together. What was the result? Significantly improved summaries. I told them I'd take the higher of the two scores, and discard the other as that would likely confuse them more than help them. The combination of high expectations for student work, and explicit reteaching made the time useful for everyone.
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