Just knife me in the heart, why dontcha.

So, I've been having my students working on the computers with who, what, when, where, why, how questions that I have literally hand-written for each students' needs, based on what their Read 180 book is about. If that's not modifying a lesson to accommodated each of their needs, I don't know what is! The students then go to http://www.google.com/ and they search for their specific subject. Subjects range from how to make chocolate, who is the founder of Halloween, who climbed Mount Everest and survived, what is the history of baseball, what is the most haunted house, who is your favorite band and what is their biography--it's all based on what book they are reading. They each have six questions to answer.

For example, I have several students reading the book, The Band. I sat down with each student and wrote out questions that were based on their reading levels. For Kasim, I made sure that the questions were fairly simple and short. "Who is your favorite band?" It sounds so simple, but it took him forever just to figure that one out and how to google it. Not to mention he was just screwing around on the internet by typing gibberish into the search line and then telling me he couldn't find anything. That boy absolutely infuriates me sometimes, and no, I didn't help him because he chose to waste my time. Anyhow. For another student who is more proficient, I wrote it in a different manner; "Who is your favorite band? Who are the members within that band (real names)?" Obviously it doesn't seem like that much of a difference, but the added sentence bogged down his time and he had to search within the text a little more.

I'm also having the students work on Responsibility posters. I'm pretty sick of the posters to be honest. However, Emina made me this really cute poster with my name on it, and it completely warmed my heart.

Speaking of my heart, it was crushed today! It's the last day of first quarter, and I posed the following question for the warm-up: "Think back on all of the things we have done this quarter. What do you think you learned the most about? Reflection should be 5-6 sentences."

Third hour had no problem with this. They wrote about our Alliteration sentences, the Donner Party project, the DOL, the posters we've done about respect and responsibility (and therefore what they've learned about those two words), about the centers...

And then fifth, six, and seventh hour came along. "Miss Franklin," Omida stated. "I didn't learn anything. All we did were projects."

O.O

It's true. For the most part, all we did were projects; there were no specific units of study because I don't have a textbook to follow and I'm pretty much just going by what I think they'd enjoy learning about. But they didn't learn anything from them? At all!? Just because I didn't do what the teachers upstairs were doing--for example, what Ashley's doing with her How to Write a Friendly Letter, which looked amazing and I wanted to steal it for myself for use later in life--doesn't mean I wasn't having them learn anything.

I posed my sad question to Sierra who had come up to my desk while I was writing this entry.

"Did you really not learn anything at all in this class?" I asked, saddened by this new, incredibly embarrassing knowledge.

Sierra frowned and said, "Yeah, we learned a lot in this class. We learned.... well, I can't think of anything but math right now, but we did learn a lot."

They don't even consider what they're doing with this research project learning!

So... my sincere, bottomless, completely wrong and stupid hope is that the projects were so much fun and so effortless for them that they learned things without even realizing that that's what they were doing.

Have the past nine weeks been completely useless and dumb? Oh my gosh. I'm so sad right now.