yet another reason my school is so awesome

i think i've mentioned my toughest class. they're really out of control. there are a few motivated students in there, but they're really suffering because the rest of the class makes teaching a lesson nearly impossible. i've tried investigative group work, experiments, lecturing, games, and nothing seems to get through to them.

anyhow it seems they're starting to cause a problem for other teachers now too, and the genius kid in that class has asked to switch out.

well this afternoon i heard the administration has decided to break up that class a bit and switch around some kids' schedules to make the group more manageable. all the kids take the same classes and have the same hours, so it wouldn't make a difference in their education, it would hopefully just subdue this cracked out class.

i think it's so awesome my school would do that just to respond to the teacher's and a few kids' needs.

also, they're thinking of switching some kids into an single inclusion class. right now, all the classes are inclusion, and the one or two sped kids in each class are really suffering since they're not getting the academic support they need. with one specific inclusion class, we could include the sped kids with those that just need some extra help, and with the sped teacher pushing in to support, it should go much more smoothly.

i'm all for heterogenous classrooms, really. but with the sped kids and no team teacher, they're falling way behind. for the most part, the more advanced kids can help out the average and somewhat below grade level kids during regular classwork, but the sped kids really need a lot more academic support.

i also finished grading and analyzing the data from my quizzes. my failure rate has dropped from 54% to 50%. and 27% of these failures are from kids who came to class in the last week and missed nearly all of the first month of school. this means that over half the people who failed my last quiz passed this one. but the real big deal has been the movement to the top tier. 5% of my kids scored above an 85 last time, but this time 18% of my kids are above an 85. That's huge. I really think on the test next week I can get closer to 25% of them above an 85. It's finally time to start and honors wall!!