an educational economy

Life, at this exact moment, is all about surviving the next two weeks. The enormous amount of papers, assignments, grading, and pre-Thanksgiving stress leading right up to the next derby bout of Antoinettes versus Punches. But I did just get back from a pretty cool presentation on a third grade class room that is run like a corporation. It gives me hope for the rest of my school year, that it can be saved. Basically this guy started and economy in his classroom, beginning much like I had wanted to do originally with paying for desired behaviors. I just wasn't on my game enough at the start of school to implement anything effectively. But I think that now, listening to what he's done, I could probably handle it and I think it would work wonders for my kids. So that's something.

Also, I'm debating about having my derby life intertwine with my school life. I want to get the rollergirls to do something with my school or just my sixth grade, but I realize that it would probably compromise my school's anonymity out in the internets and beyond. Not that I have many blog readers, and not that I'm a particularly popular rollergirl, but it would be out there for anyone and everyone and I would have to cope with that. It will probably be just fine, but still I'm sure that there would be consequences that even I can't imagine, good or bad.

In the effort to make my tests more LEAP-like, to better prepare my kids for the 6th grade iLEAP and beyond, I gave a mostly multiple choice test today. I am wary of grading it, as I don't know new levels of disappointment my kids can dredge up. On the other hand, my hope when I was writing the test was that it would actually make things easier on some level. Kids would have choices, an idea of what the answer might be. On the other hand, a lot of my kids see multiple choice and just start circling answers without paying much attention to what the answer means. Here goes nothing.