How Do You Handle Extra Credit?

I’ll be honest. I don’t handle extra credit well. In fact, I’m so lousy at it, I offered just two projects each year. If you’ve ever tried offering extra credit, you know the problems it can cause:

• Students might focus all their energy on the extra credit project and neglect their everyday work.
• Students will ask for extra credit projects the night before grades are due.
• Too much extra credit can skew a student’s grade to the point where you’re not sure if she mastered the material or just knew how to play the game.
• You get slammed with extra credit projects in addition to your end-of-quarter grading and have no time to sleep.

No Big Deal: Providing a Classroom Environment Where It’s Safe to Participate

I remember sitting in my high school chemistry class and praying that the teacher wouldn’t call on me. I made no eye contact, sunk low in my seat, and tried to hide behind my long hair. It worked pretty well. The times that the teacher did call on me, I was so hopelessly lost that I just mumbled some answer. He learned not to ask me questions and I learned how to master that queasy feeling in my gut. Chemistry? I didn’t learn very much of that at all.

As a teacher, I know better. If I have a student who’s hiding from me and unwilling to answer a question, I have a problem. That’s not a kid who’s learning; that’s a kid who’s miserable for an hour each day.

Want to Boost Test Scores? Wish Your Students Good Luck

Ben Goldacre is a medical doctor in the U.K. who writes a column in The Guardian called “Bad Science” and has a blog of the same name. Goldacre takes pride in debunking the pseudo-scientific claims from the dietary supplements, baby genius, and cosmetics industries.

Despite the fact that Dr. Goldacre doesn’t believe in the amazing health benefits and antioxidant powers of chocolate, I think that his conclusinons are sound, expecially those about the mind’s incredible response to belief.

How to Redirect Chatting Students

I remember as a new teacher I had trouble with what I perceived as the whole class talking. Sure, this was the problem – at the end of September. The talkers had taken over to the point where I felt like I had to hold the entire class after the bell – never a good idea.

However, if I could have looked back at the beginning of the school year, I could have picked out the major talkers. But, I was new. I didn’t know that to stop the problem of the whole class talking, I had to redirect those big talkers right away.

How Do You Handle Passes for Destinations outside Your Class?

I admit it: I was one of those teachers who would give a student a pass to come to the journalism room out of another teacher’s class.

In my defense, I always asked the other teacher ahead of time to send Amanda, JoAnna, Matt, or Jason to the journalism room if they were finished with their work in class.

Last week’s post was about restroom passes. This week, I’m tackling passes to destinations unknown. How do you handle a request to go to the library/media center? The nurse’s office? The parking lot?

How Do You Handle Restroom Passes?

A reader left this comment on last week’s post, “Top Ten Things I Learned about Teaching This Year.”

I learned from watching other teachers that children who go to the “restroom” hardly EVER really need to relieve their bladders. It seems that the restroom is the place to meet friends, exchange cell phones, listen to music, make out with the opposite sex, or fight. Teachers should be very careful about sending students to the “restroom” unescorted and untimed.

When I taught, many horrible things happened when I gave out a restroom pass. I learned from my mistakes and came up with this system:

Top Ten Things I Learned about Teaching This Year

The school year’s almost over, or maybe it is over for some of you lucky people. You’re checking in books, correcting exams, and closing up the grade book. You know that some of your lessons really met the objectives and the kids learned a lot. They caught the spark and you could see how the new understanding captured their interest.

But what did you learn? Did you catch that spark? Did you have an ah-ha moment? I’m out of the classroom and able to talk education experts. Here are my ah-ha moments:

Reducing Classroom Noise to Increase Classroom Learning

People don’t believe me when I tell them about my first classroom in the South almost 20 years ago. To be fair, my school district was in a poor part of the state and we hardly had money for textbooks and postage, let alone sound tiles and noise-reducing carpet.

My central noise problem didn’t come from my students, loud hallways, or sound bouncing off the classroom’s hard, bare walls and floors. My noise problem came from the enormous air conditioning unit that hung from my classroom’s ceiling. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I write that this unit had the dimensions of an office cubicle, but just half as tall.

User Beware: A New Type of Phishing Attack – “Tabnabbing”

As educators, we’re online a lot. We enter our grades and attendance online, we e-mail parents, we store our lesson plans electronically and we sometimes check our personal e-mail accounts or online bank statements. In other words, teachers aren’t so different from most people: we’ve become used to using the computer for all kinds of work and personal tasks and we wonder how we ever lived before Google, Excel, and Farmville.