Today was Friday, which also marked the last Friday of a four-day week for a while. These will be tough times ahead, people, as March has no breaks. Monday though Friday for six more weeks. The kids kind of lose their minds.
Fridays are funny. Other teachers like them, for reasons unknown. Maybe they give their students a bunch of book work and sit at their desks and catch up on their grading. I give tests, because then I have the whole weekend to grade them. I like to keep grades updated because I had teachers who never gave us a clue what our grades were, and I didn’t like that concept or those teachers.
Honors had Vocabulary, plus speeches about their fears. We’re in the final stages of 1984, so fear is a big deal. APN had a paper of evidence–the domestic grosses of the top 100 movies of time–and had to make claims that the evidence gave them. I get tired of the new-found, “We must give them two articles and have them annotate them” theory of forming claims and essential questions. Evidence comes in many forms, and the more they can recognize and relate to, the better.
At lunch we had Mind Madness, which is our school’s trivia/knowledge contest where teams of four are whittled down from 48 to 1. The winning team gets 400 bucks. It’s fun, the kids get into it a little, and it’s in the realm of competition (with a winner and loser, no less) that gets them talking about the matches long into 5th period, after lunch. It’s Jeopardy meets College Bowl (I’m dating myself) meets Nickelodeon, as some of the questions are geared for the after-school, television-watching crowd. You may have to know systems of the body, but you better know who Drake and Josh are, too.
The data–uh oh, here it comes!–that it generates, though, is not very pretty. It does cost something like three bucks per kid to enter, but you do get a shirt. But there are only 48 teams this year, and one team only has two players. Let’s do the math–that makes 190 total students competing. North High School has around 400+ students alone who take honors and AP English (Language in 11th and Literature in 12th), yet only 190 do a FUN activity? This year, we have something like 500+ kids taking 800+ AP exams, yet only 190 want to compete against one another?
Hmmmm.
In recent years, too, the Mind Madness winner has not come from the super geniuses. Our valedictorians and students who got accepted into great colleges and universities, along with others who are ranked in the top 10 overall at school have struck no fear into the regular students who have taken them down. Four years ago, a Mind Madness team went through the field and won, beating a team where all members were going to Irvine, Santa Barbara, Cal, and Cal Poly SLO. The team that won had three players that had under a 3.0 GPA and would be attending El Camino College. The other player went to Long Beach State. The final wasn’t even close.
Hmmmmm.
Most teachers and faculty didn’t give it much thought, but this has happened more than once recently. What does it mean when our best and brightest are easily beaten in a knowledge competition? And beaten by a bunch of kids that are going to El Camino College, the destination our district considers a way lesser choice than any four-year.
Data. It comes in many forms. https://youtu.be/4vhNRl9N9R4