Copying an Consequences

Today was pretty frustrating. Each day at lunch, I spend an hour with four or five of my grade nine math students. We practice different problems on the board, all four working independantly, and then after they give me their note books and I make up some extra problems to help them practice in the areas with which they are struggling. They then hand it in the next morning, and I mark it. If I'm not satisfied, then I write up more notes and examples and problems and they hand it in the next day. It's a lot of work but I feel that giving them that extra individual attention MUST help, right?

Yesterday we had a quiz that I didn't mark until today because I had about 15 notebooks full of weekend work. The quiz results were dismal. Out of 25, half the class got under five points. I had a few of my favourites score 19 and 20, and a bunch of students got 12 or 13. But come on. What is going on? Other than the issues with integers (I think some teacher somewhere must have skipped that chapter, because many of them have issues with the number line) this is mostly new stuff. It's not reliant on past knowledge. The only teacher to blame for the low scores is me.

I had two girls who, on last Wednesday, as we approached the end of the chapter, hadn't done a lick of chapter 10 homework. I gave them until today to hand in all assignments. They both did- every question, every section. But they both scored below 5 on the quiz. Something fishy. I took another look at their books... It seemed like messy, quick writing. There were no scribbles or eraser marks. I wrote down a few fairly easy questions from the homework that they had gotten correct and brought them to the two girls. Neither of them came anywhere close to the correct answer. After letting them hem and haw for a good long while, I was like, well, these SHOULD be familiar, since you did them in the homework. And then I asked them if they did the homework or if they copied, and one girl started to cry. She admitted to copying but the other was being all snickery and kept turning away. I gave them both lunch detention (and I will make them sit silently and do every single question in the chapter, coming during every lunch break from now until they finish). It's so frustrating. Nobody likes being lied to. And then I gave the class quite the lecture on copying and cheating. It was quite angry, and then I went home and cried for a bit.

This was all before school even started, so I headed back to in teach the class. Luckily my grade ten physics girls were in hilarious spirits. We're doing ray diagrams and they're all really into it. We've started a new thing where we applaud everybody who comes up to the board to draw a ray. But then I went next to the grade nines for math. I'm slowing the lessons down (even though I may or may not be screwing over the next term's teacher by leaving her more that a third of the material to cover) so that every time I do an example on the board, I walk around and give everybody some time to try it. So today I discovered that many girls haven't ever copied down a single note that I've written on the board. They're just totally resigned to failing math forever that the just sit quietly in class and don't even listen. I stood over a girl's shoulder to make her attempt one of the examples, and discovered that she doesn't know how to multiply. She had to look up five time seven in a little book she carries around. COME ON. This is the same girl who, during her lunch time learning session, kept asking to go to the bathroom. Listen, we all have had those days, you know? I though I was being the chillest teacher ever by lettin her in without making her feel awkward about it, until I saw that she had just been writing questions on her hand and getting help from the people outside. I felt so used. I cried after that as well. My first though is to be like, FINE, SUCKER! Never learn math and see if I care when you can never get a job because all employers look at high school transcripts and particularly at math even in non-math related fields. It's your own funeral! I guess if I were a good teacher, I'd want her to learn for the sake of learning. But I'm a spiteful person I guess... that girl is going to learn the heck out of chapter 10, because she's also going to learn that you do not lie to me, and you do not cheat. I wish there were a math equivalent of making somebody run laps. A punishment to make them think about what they've done, you know? "Drop and give me 50 push ups, and then factor this!" I guess I could make her write out times tables again and again, or, like the other two copying girls, just sit in silence for every single lunch period doing every question in the chapter. It's so much work.

My phone only lets of type a certain number of characters per text box and its hilarious that I've reached it. I'll have to start a new post.