In order to get back into blogging this year I just decided to randomly pick something that I liked doing this year in school that I haven’t shared yet. I am choosing something from my linear unit with my low-level algebra II class. We needed some extra practice that day and I really wasn’t ready to quiz them so in order for them to get more practice, I made up a fake quiz and then took it. I purposely put in many of the mistakes that I see all the time. I gave each group a copy of my quiz so they had to work together to figure it out. Everyone had a separate worksheet to fill out and explain what I did wrong or right and award me points.
The kids thought this was so much fun. They liked joking around with me telling me I need to do a better job and not mess up on easy mistakes (even though I think some of those students did the exact thing the day before…). I even had one group write me a letter on a piece of paper outlining steps for me to succeed. This included coming in for help to their office hours and going to the tutoring center. It was hilarious. I really liked that students would argue over how many points they would give me. Something I did not expect, was that at least one group in every class would have such a big debate about how many points they would award me. It actually turned into a cool discussion about how I grade and the students came up with the fact that they should show as much work as possible in order to get more points. I am so glad I did this earlier in the year as I have referred back to it a few times. Actually, it might be a good time to try one of these again in the near future.
Functions Are Fun 