Period 6

Class has been in session for two full weeks now. My sixth period sophmores are starting to push the limits. In the beginning I told them that they could eat as long as there was no food or garbage left on the floor. After class yesterday I found two chip wrappers and a plastic bottle on the floor. Now there will be a new food policy in sixth period only: no food or drink except water. Also there was a constant barrage of students asking to go to the bathroom. I am starting a new bathroom policy- only with sixth period at this point. Susan swears by this method. She said that the first couple of years the students moaned and groaned about it but now they seemed fine with it. For the semester they have six bathroom passes. I will give them two bonus points at the semester for every bathroom pass that they don't use and twenty bonus points if they use none.

Also I am struggling to make the sophomore class interesting. I gave the students an assignment yesterday which I thought would be straightforward. I showed them a little cartoon that was an adaption of a Ray Bradbury story, The Pedestrian. Then I showed them a student presentation I had found on Youtube. I thought that it was very funny. Four action figures (from some online game)carrying hugh weapons were discussing with literary terms the story The Pedestrian. I asked my students to write a page using ten of the eighteen literary terms that we have studied so far. They had great difficulty understanding the assignment- in fourth period. So together we took the movie Monsters Inc. and tried to come up with at least the beginning of a piece of writing. I tweeked it slightly for sixth period but it still was a struggle. Four out of 33 papers in Period 4 did a good job, with one of them excellent.