04/05/10

Today in my two double periods I did a short lesson and then had application exercises for the kids to do in groups. I told them that they had to work in groups of 2 or 3 people and each group had to have at least one girl and one boy and that they needed to figure it out as a class because I wouldn’t write the exercise on the board until all the groups were properly formed, so they could either do well on the exercise as a class, or suffer as a class. My first class wasted a lot of time and eventually I had to tell a couple people to switch groups, but they eventually got the groups formed. When it came to the second class they actually formed the groups much quicker, but one group remained that had only 2 boys in it and all the girls were refusing to switch groups. After a while I told the class “there are 8 groups with 2 girls in them, so that means that there are 16 girls who can work with these two boys and when that happens I will write the exercise on the board.” When this still didn’t work I told them, “if one of you 16 girls doesn’t move to this group in one minute I will give all 16 of you zeros for today, kick you out for the remainder of the period, and you will have to do the exercise for homework.” I was hoping that threat at least would get results. Unfortunately it didn’t, so one minute later I was forcibly removing 16 girls from my classroom. They apparently went and complained to their homeroom director because he stopped by my class a few minutes later and asked why I had kicked out all these girls because of only one person. I explained that between the 16 of them only one of them needed to step up and take responsibility but nobody would and I gave them ample warning before kicking them out. He graciously apologized saying “I’m sorry, they lied when they told me what happened,” and left.
Last week I watched a colleague’s 8th grade English lesson and they were reviewing the homework, which had been to write a composition on their school break last week. One of the students wrote the following composition on the board (I probably would find this less amusing if I were actually an English teacher…). “My holiday was is going Secondary school 4 the October to watched play and athletic is wain secondary school Laura Vicuña play and athletic is looked teacher drive player and athletic.”