April 11, 2008, Friday!
Notice the exclamation point at the end of word Friday(!)? well, it is really because it is Friday! This means teacher get to leave early from school and students who have attained a Peer Leader status according to the Point System that the school is implementing will have some free time in the afternoon!
The Point system that the school is using is divided into three groups of achieving points. The highest level is called the Peer Leader Status, when students only missed a total of about 96 minutes off their learning time on a weekly basis. Learning time, is when the students stay in class, participate in class and is a student fulfilling all his responsibilities and expectations. When students get to miss up to 400 minutes in a week, the level drops to what the school calls Level Two Status and the last one is the Level One Status. This point system is meant to motivate students to try to stay in class despite whatever issue they may be faced with in a certain day but at the same time, allowing the students to use a good amount of minutes they may absolutely need, but still achieving the level they desire. Each of these statuses equate a whole set of incentives. The Peer leader gets all the privileges in the school (that is why this is the ultimate prize!) including the use of computer in the classroom, use of baseball cap/hat all day, all week and an extra credit of getting the pizza topping they want to have. (By the way, Friday is always a Pizza day in school! – something to be happy about again on Friday!) One of our students in our class has been on this status for two consecutive months, pretty amazing, right?
It is Friday – but when it comes to lessons, I was determined to get the experiment done today and we did it! Each group worked with each other testing a set of 10 objects whether these things react better in tension or compression or both. It was fun to see all of them apply pulling or pushing forces, while some of them record their answers on their science notebook experiment! All of them worked, except for one of the students who refused to work in his group and requested to take space. Later, I talked with this student and was able to voice out the reason why he left the room when we were conducting the experiment. It was a matter of social interactions between him and his classmates, but he agreed to work on this experiment sometime next week with me.
It was a great Friday class and we got to finish the first lesson on Building Bridges this week. Next week, our lesson will be on bridges’ weight.
