Friday, March 8, 2013

Not Great Quizzing Conditions

Every day, the health students get three new vocabulary words. Then every Friday, they have a quiz over those words.

This was day three of a four day assignment. (Their teacher was at a conference.) Period 5 was my least favorite group of the day. That is not to say that they were awful. Rather, they were rather typical for freshmen. Problem (for them) was that the rest of the classes were wonderful, so period 5 suffered by comparison.

I put their five question quiz up on the overhead. First thing I heard: "Number one is appetite."

Great. And it was the correct answer.

I managed to get them settled somehow, and I stood at the front of the room, watching. Waiting. They only got five minutes for the quiz, and then we were going to move on to something else.

"What does hunger mean?"

I glared at the boy. Since question number two was to define hunger, I replied with: "If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me, 'how do you spell ___?' during a spelling test..."

They should have been silent. At least the questions they had they directed at me.

"Are we your favorite class?"

Um, no. Not even close.

But I never tell a class that. I hedge. I find nice things to say about them.

However, they were taking a quiz. They were supposed to be silent. I reminded them of this. Then I collected their quizzes.

3 comments:

  1. With regard to vocabulary words, I think it would be more useful to have the students learn the Latin roots and be able to define the words by examining what parts make up the whole.

    ReplyDelete
  2. What does hunger mean? And these were freshmen?

    Just...just no.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I would have told him that hunger is what he will experience when he fails out of high school and can't find a job.

    ReplyDelete

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