September 2, 2010

Teachable Moments from Silly Quizzes

Today was listening quiz day. It's one of my favorite days all semester. It's the day when students get completely terrified because "My God, she's giving us a quiz already." Then they get into the guts of the quiz and start acting like total fools (or they sit around and watch everyone else look like a fool); and then finally end up with the realization that they have not given their first assignment their all. Not even close.

It's a make or break moment in class and that is why it is so very worth it to watch 10 minutes of complete insanity. You can read the entire quiz here so you understand what I'm talking about. You can also read about another listening quiz day in class here. Ah, they are such good days. If you're too lazy to click over to read the quiz, you'd probably make it to #20 like so many of my students did today, and that's not a good thing. I'm just sayin'. (Made you click, didn't I?)

Because I have a lot of upperclassmen in this class, I figured I wouldn't be able to fool them all. However, having read their assignments, I didn't really know what to expect. Here's what I got: out of the 18 students in my class, only three people got it from the very beginning. The rest were high-fiving people across the room, walking around the classroom like they had ants in their pants, and screaming out "Yes, I'm so smart!

At one point, a student said out loud, "Oh man" and I thought she had figured it out. However, she went on to say, "I can't believe I have to do jumping jacks." She was on #19 and #20 brought complete silence and a slightly reddened and embarrassed face.

Another girl yelled out, "This is lame!" to which my response was, "No, what's lame is that so many of you didn't follow directions." There was no denying that, and the room filled with silence. I let them sit there in it for a minute.

"So, what's the point?" I asked them when I felt the silence had done its job. "Why do you think I chose to torture you like this today?"

My one freshman student, who totally got it and turned in near perfect assignments on Tuesday, nailed it. "You wanted to stress the importance of paying attention and following directions."

Thank you.

Moments like this in the classroom can do one of two things. If the student has been supremely embarrassed, they can get mad at you and adopt an attitude problem. But this has never happened in my classroom and it didn't happen today.

What did happen was pretty awesome. I partnered the students up with someone who could help them. Those who had a ton of content but no organization in their speech outlines got partnered up with those who had a perfectly formatted outline with zero info in it. And the conversations that I heard were incredible. About half of the class told me they were completely reworking their outlines and asked if I'd take a look at their new outline tonight or over the weekend. They know they're not getting any extra credit for revisions. They just want to work harder and get themselves on the right track. It felt like a major breakthrough with this class that hasn't really seemed able to "get me" thus far.

After class, I had wanted to speak with a student that I had for writing last year. I was shocked and horrified when this student turned in one of the most horribly written assignments I had ever seen. He earned next to no credit for it and I wanted to pull him aside, shake him, and scream, "I taught you better than that! What are you DOING?"

I didn't have to. He approached me after class, apologized for handing in garbage and showed me a revision he had done before even getting my abysmal feedback.

On Tuesday night, I would have told you that this group would be my worst speech group ever. However, after today, I'm quite certain that this group will be one of my hardest working groups ever. There is so much potential and it took a super silly quiz to tap it. As a teacher, there is nothing better than days like today.