Test Before Break

The dilemma is Spring Break and having the students remember what it is that we were working on before they took 9 days off.  It came to me on the drive home while listening to Pandora.  The song "Story of My Life" by Social Distortion was the song.  I ended up getting into it just like Tom Cruise got into the song "Free Falling" .

I researched YouTube and was able to find a link that showed the lyrics.  As a class we listened and watched.  Afterwards, we broke it down to how each of the verses or as my kids corrected me, the sonnets, were set up.  We determined whether or not it had to rhyme, how many sentences were in a sonnet, and how the syllables went along with the tune.

The kids were wrapping up a unit on Right Triangles.  It turned out to work perfectly.  Since there were only 5 students who showed up in class and 5 different topics we talked about, each student chose a topic and began putting together their song.  They worked for the entirety of the class, asked very good questions, listened to the song more times than I could stand, helped each other, laughed and learned.  They did this while most other teachers were watching movies.

The good that came out of it is that students were getting a chance to step back and focus on the topic.  They didn't complete the song due to poor planning of time, but this turns out to be a good thing.  We will complete our songs on the Monday we get back, giving the students a renewed focus as to where we were before they left.  One student who missed a class that week picked a topic he was not in class for.  So he had to learn the topic before he could write about it.  Naturally, his classmates helped him with this.  I had them focus their energy this time into the meat and potatoes of the lessons as opposed to the poems that we did and most of them simply just wrote about how they feel about the subject matter.

The feedback that I got was mostly a positive one.  The students' only gripe was that they weren't able to choose the song that they would write to.  They wanted a rap song.  I told them my car driving story and they were pretty much SOL once I heard that on the radio.

We are going to wrap this up by recording it and if it's any good, we will post it on YouTube.