Monday, March 14, 2011

OGT testing... oh the fun.

Day 1 of our statewide testing was today.  It makes for a weird week - especially since I have a sophomore homeroom that has to take the test every day.

We adjust our schedule to give the sophomores (and freshmen, who are taking a practice test) 2 hours every morning before school starts for the test.  The juniors and seniors get to come in a couple of hours late - I'm sure you realize that this is something they look forward to all year!

I think it's a great solution, especially because it keeps the kids testing from missing any classes.  Unfortunately, because we've lost 2 hours in our day it shortens all of our other classes to 31 minutes.  I literally feel like a chicken with my head cut off running around during class and trying to get everything done that I want to do.

Today, though, I got it all done.  I think.
1.  Taught the Law of Sines in precalc.  I couldn't do a discovery-type thing because of my time limit, but I was able to get through a couple of examples (including the ambiguous case).  I was actually down to 25 minutes in my first period class because the test always runs over the first day.
2.  Re-taught solving systems using substitution in Algebra 1.  I think there may actually be a couple of kids (out of 10) that know how to do it now.  Slowly but surely....
3.  Reviewed nth roots with Algebra 2, answered lots of questions (especially involving those pesky absolute values!)

Tomorrow's plan:
1.  Law of Cosines (we actually did it earlier in the year when talking vectors, so it should be a review).
2.  Solving by substitution.  Again.  I may pull out some notecards and try Elissa Miller's idea.
3.  Review of combinations of functions (add, subtract, multiply, divide, compositions), inverse functions, and nth roots for a quiz on Weds.

31 minutes.  Phew.

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