Bad Apples

It didn't surprise me that a majority of them didn't do their homework. Progress reports come out next week. Things were going well with the discussion of "Can Animals Think," but all it takes is just a couple of students to be disruptive and it ruins everything. I thought that the sign language discussion was fun because in the article, an orangutang learned sign language. A few students knew the alphabet, and one student knew some words and phrases. I then brought it closer to home with gang signs, although they are inappropriate and against school policy, I felt they could relate better to the story with some kind of connection. There's a test tomorrow on the article. It's a short test, and it will be interesting to see how well they do on it. Conjunctions and interjections was a fun exercise. They seemed to enjoy it because I put some of their names in the examples.

We added two new students to 8th grade and it seems to be a little bit more fun because there are more students to ask questions and get feedback from. We worked on grammar and elements of a personal narrative. The class might get even bigger after progress reports come out. Overall, it was a good day.