Going Pretty Fast In Class

It is Monday, the start of the first full week with students. Monday is our "every period" class, where we see each class for about 44 minutes or so. Not really enough time to get a lot done.

Today, we are making sure that everyone is logged in properly and Mr. Jewett is setting up email accounts for the students. A couple of kids are still having a hard time getting logged in, so I am logging them in on my account to let them follow along with the classes.

For the Computer I classes, Monday is "typing" day. They work on the typing tutor program the whole class period. They have to complete at least 8 of the typing lessons by the end of the quarter. Each lesson takes almost a whole period. The typing tutor program starts by having them work on home row keys, then moves them on to simple home row words and a "blast the aliens" typing game with home row words. The program keeps track of their speeds and slowly begins to increase the "words per minute" rate needed to move from one sub-lesson to the next. One girl, L., was progressing very well and got to a sub-lesson where she had to type a section at 43 wpm before she could move on to the next section (this was much faster than any of the other students in the class at the time.) She kept trying and trying, but coming up with scores of 41 or 42. She started getting a little discouraged. I kept checking in with her, trying to help keep her going. Finally, she got to 44 and was really pleased with herself. She looked around to find me and show me her score. Kind of neat, in a "very small moment" sort of way.

The next two classes were working on Fireworks Graphics and .html coding for basic website design. Mr. Jewett likes to give short little mini-lessons on how to do things in Fireworks. He will bring up a canvas, put in a figure, demonstrate a couple of effects and then have the student do the same on their computer. Unfortunately, Mr. Jewett's computer has a different program version (build) from the students, so his menus are completely different from everyone else's. This is very confusing. It should be fixed by Friday.

There tends to be a great deal of differentiation of abilities in our Graphics and our Web Design Classes. Some kids are pretty computer savvy and whip through Mr. Jewett's activities in a couple of minutes. Then, they like to try new things and experiment, which is ok, as that is generally the best way to learn computer programs. There are some students, however, that struggle to keep up and have a hard time "making the leap" from Mr. Jewett's samples to their own computer. It appears to be difficult to accomodate all speeds of learning within a single classroom without holding the faster kids back and without losing the struggling kids. I am helping out the "slower" group as best I can.

Mr. Jewett, as I stated before, likes to do a lot of "flying by the seat of the pants" instruction. This is a little less structured than I would like to do things. If I were running these classes, I would likely have a "mini-agenda" posted on the board at the start of each class to help give a little bit of clarity to the period.