Students who took the World Regional Geography quiz on the Americas this week: 19
Median grade: 48
Average grade: 48
Average of the students in the front half of the classroom: 61
Average of the students in the back half of the classroom: 31
Percentage of students who could locate the Amazon river valley on a map of the Americas: 18%
And so forth.
(yes, even more so than economics)
I have been attempting (in a completely non-rigorous fashion) to keep better tabs on how I spend (aka waste) my time. Yesterday morning for example when I should have been organizing slide shows and lecture notes, I spent almost an hour with my usual rounds of email and websites.
This evening I have spent 2.5 hours on a various of accounting tasks for school: writing my students who are entitled to extra time on next week's quiz to ask what sort of arrangements would work for them; ordering a 60-day review copy of a book called Making Learning Come Alive by David Smokler; and trying to impose some order on 4 sets of course files (two laptops and two jump drives, one of which has been lost (but now found!) for the last week). Productive, actually. I am learning new things all the time about how to organize FROM THE BEGINNING to save time down the road. Good systems streamline the annoying daily junk and allow me to focus on what I really like to do in all this, which is invent new ways to make all this geography stuff interesting to the jaded 13th grader.
Well, in retrospect the whole Columbus thing maybe wasn't the best for the planet (see alternate opinion by searching on Pastwatch by Orson Scott Card) but at least I get a day off out of it.
I am gonna relax tonight with what's left of the evening and read a new (pop) book on teaching called Mindset: the New Psychology of Success. I'm in a reading group that will be "studying" it. With a quick browse, I doubt if it really merits 5 meetings, but we'll see....
Just finished skim-reading V.S. Naipaul's Miguel Street. I found it quite by accident on the shelves in the library - it's not cataloged separately from the other two selections that it is bound with, which are The Mystic Masseur and The Suffrage of Elvira.
The book flap calls Miguel Street "delightfully comic" in contrast to his later, dark, violent novels. Perhaps so: but I just found the stories dated and a bit elitist. And not offering any insight really into the geography of the Caribbean. I have made a copy of part of his non-fiction novella (?) The Return of Eva Peron because it describes Montevideo, but I am not sure if the Montevideo of 1972 is really relevant for teaching purposes in World Regional Geography.