Students: 18
One thing that went well: I gave them a six-question grammar quiz as part of our accuracy review this morning. Honestly, my motivation for doing so was to get data that was meaningful to them for our daily mini-demo on spreadsheets. But the data turned out to be very informative for me. I found that one of my questions was unduly difficult and why (whoops), about 2/3 of the class was pretty solid on the grammar point, and about 4 people (I was surprised at who they were) were struggling considerably. Very good to know! Note to self: low-stakes quiz more often.
One thing to improve: The warm-up was weak and lacked any structure at all. This was not a choice, but a result of saying during my planning, “I’ll come back to the detail of how exactly they should practice each other’s names” and then doing so when I didn’t have enough time to figure it out. I ended up telling them that they had 7 minutes to study each other’s names, first and last. It actually seemed to go pretty well: many of them used their grids from Monday, everybody was involved, and later on during the break I heard snippets of “how do you spell your name?” Free-form seemed to have been a good idea – I’d just like to use it intentionally in the future.
One surprise: This week, several students have mentioned to me that they’re stressed in class. Not in tears or anything, and always with a laugh, but still. In some ways this is not actually a surprise because a couple of them just moved up from Level 2. But one of the students has been Level 3 for a while now, and though her writing is excellent, she mentioned that it really stresses her out. I guess I’m surprised that I could both be stressing out my students and that they’d be willing to tell me so – you’d think they’d be mutually exclusive. Also, I’m not really sure what to do. Thoughts?