Gladly Would I Teach

I dream of the day when I will be able to assign reading homework, and all of my students will read it thoroughly and come prepared to
discuss the selection in class the following day without any extra incentive, prodding, or threats of quizzes.

I’m still dreaming.

While most of our students will indeed read assigned homework passages, a few students will only read if they absolutely have to, and too many students will skim a passage instead of reading carefully. For this reason, when I am teaching a book or long work, I usually give a quick daily quiz over the homework. If students know they will have to take a quiz, most of them will read the passage carefully.

Many teachers, however, balk at the idea of daily quizzes because they don’t want to have to make up quizzes over assigned reading; they don’t want to grade daily quizzes, and they don’t want to lose so much valuable class time. I use a simple process for making and grading quizzes that takes very little time away from class.

1. I duplicate one quiz sheet for each student. This sheet can be used for 6 daily quizzes. Download Reading Quizzes

2. For each homework selection I make up 5 words, terms, concepts, or names that anyone who read the passage would know. For example, if we read a selection where a family adopted a dog, I would add the word “dog” to my quiz. I make sure that my 5 words cover the entire reading passage and are not taken exclusively from the beginning of the passage or the end of the passage.
3. In class I distribute the blank quiz sheet and tell students that they will take a quiz each day. I then call out the five words for today’s quiz and instruct the students to write them on their sheet. You may prefer to write the five words on the board or overheard.

4. I then tell students that they are to define the word or identify it so I can tell they read the homework assignment. I instruct them to reply to each word in approximately 5 words and emphasize that they should not write in sentences. For example, for “dog,” students only need to reply “family adopts.”

5. The quiz should take no more than 10 minutes.

6. I then collect the quizzes and place them in a notebook to grade. I can flip through the quizzes quickly and grade 30 quizzes in roughly 10 minutes. As I grade quizzes, I always concentrate on whether or not I think the student read the assignment. If I think he did, I give him the benefit of the doubt on each word.

7. On the following day, I pass out the graded quizzes and tell students to move to the next block to take Quiz 2.

8. I vary the difficulty level of the quiz according to the grade level of students and the level of the reading material.

9. To give an incentive to students who are present each day and to allay student whining about the obscurity of some items on the quiz, I award 50 points to the final quiz of students who take all of the quizzes and who refrain from whining about the quizzes. It works! (Students always want to add the points to their lowest quiz grade, but it makes no difference mathematically which quiz receives the extra-credit points.)

10. I make sure that I give different words on the quiz for each class that I teach because we know that students from earlier in the day tell other students what is on the quiz.
    

Here’s an example of a quiz I give on The Glass Castle (pages 3-28)

1. dumpster (author sees mother in dumpster)
2. fire (burned while cooking hotdogs)
3. Blue Goose (family’s car)
4. chlorinated water (only for sissies)
5. seizures (Brian has seizures as child

For each of the selections above, I would accept alternate answers that show the student read the homework assignment.

In time, students realize they must read carefully each night. While daily quizzes often hurt a student’s average, with this quiz format, students read better and their grades actually improve because of so many excellent quiz grades.

via www.flocabulary.com

If you want to have a little fun with Shakespeare, take a look at this.

via www.npr.org

What a nice story about the power of literature and the wonderful souls who place books in the hands of teenagers.

A recent study of 50 Princeton students uncovered that students prefer textbooks over the new Kindle DX. Aaron Horvath, one of the students in the study, told U.S. News World and Report:

“Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes, and other marks representing the importance of certain passages—not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs. All of these things have been lost, and if not lost, they’re too slow to keep up with my thinking and the ‘features’ have been rendered useless.”

Read the full article from US News & Report

Because the study involves only 50 students, it is impossible to tell if other college students will regard the Kindle DX so negatively. I own a second generation Kindle that is slightly smaller than the DX. I absolutely enjoy reading on the Kindle and love having the ability to carry over 200 books around with me wherever I go. One of my favorite things to do on Sundays is to look at The New York Times book  reviews and then download sample chapters of books that interest me to my Kindle. I have never regretted my decision to purchase a Kindle.

Even though I think the Kindle is a marvelous reading tool, I certainly understand why students might be unhappy taking notes on a Kindle. While the Kindle allows users to highlight passages, the Kindle provides black and white text only and “highlights” by underlining the text. It also takes much longer to highlight text on the Kindle than it does to highlight in a textbook or novel. Taking notes on the Kindle is so time consuming, that I rarely even attempt it.

I tend to read faster on my Kindle than when I read  a print text, probably because I do not highlight or take notes as often since these two acts are time consuming with a Kindle. As a result, when I finish reading a book on the Kindle, I don’t feel that I know it or remember it as well as I do when I read a print text.

I love my Kindle, and I hope the next generation of Kindles will include easier and faster methods for highlighting and note taking. A stylus for taking notes and highlighting would be perfect.

And what I would give for a Kindle with color.