This year my district bribed us with $3000 to implement a "flex" period in our daily schedule. It's a 30-minute time that we can use to help students catch up/make up assignments, to help fill in the gaps of "learning loss", or to help work with students on social-emotional things.
I've tried a week of the social-emotional, and in a couple classes I can keep it up, but as I wrote here and here, my top university-bound students are in a world of mathematical hurt. Too many of them are not adequately prepared for the course they're enrolled in.
I can keep with the social-emotional stuff, or I can try to fill in the gaps. I made the decision today in those top classes, and today we "reviewed" factoring polynomials. We'll spend several "flex" periods doing so.
Then, perhaps we'll move on to logarithms--unless I find a more immediate need.
Update, 9/6/21: I'm told that perhaps within a week, one of my Financial Math classes will be moved to another teacher as part of a big shuffle and I'll get a brand new statistics class.
We've already completed Chapter 1 in statistics and are well into Chapter 2. We only complete five chapters in the first semester.
I guess this new statistics class will have to get caught up somehow, and "flex" is the time to do that.
Grin, I'm just surprised that you even tried the social-emotional approach. The students need to know the material and how to do math.
ReplyDeleteThis sounds similar to the "Block Lunch" my district implemented specifically for the benefit of tutorial time of demographic groups that were struggling on annual standardized exams. The assumption was students would go to teachers for help in core subjects. The reality was the students used the time to goof off, promote fights, commit vandalism (by the end of the year only three of nine boys' bathrooms were still open...) and find unguarded spaces to have sex. It was a nightmare. The few diligent students, who really didn't need tutoring, begged for spaces in teachers classrooms to avoid the chaos. This was one of the reasons I decided to retire early. It created more problems than it solved and administration was unwilling to admit it for three years.
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