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.

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.

A Culture of School Discipline

The committee of teachers who interviewed me for the high school principal’s job had the usual questions, but it was clear that they all shared one overriding concern. “How do you feel about discipline?” is the way one teacher put it.

Feel about it? How do I feel about it? “Well,” I answered truthfully, “I’m not sure what you mean, but I will say that without good discipline in a school very little learning takes place.”

How to Address Classroom Cheating

The other day, my daughter’s middle school teacher caught my kid cheating. My daughter was finishing up a test, had moved to the classroom’s back tables, and was working when the next class entered the room. The bell rang and teacher began to teach. My kid quietly returned to her stack of books, removed the top layer, and took out a piece of paper that had writing on it.