Tone

I have a student in my junior American Lit class who often likes to test my limits. Let's call him "Tone" for the sake of our cyber- conversation. Tone is an all around nice guy. He likes to make people laugh, but is by no means a class clown. Tone just likes to socialize. When I first took over the class, Tone was respectful of me, but often disrupted the class with his constant conversation with his neighbors. He really isn't much of a distraction during class discussions, possibly trying to lay low so I won't call on him. He seems to mainly want to talk to his neighbors when sstudents are supposed to be work independently and quietly.
I orginally thought maybe the problem stemmed from my master teacher's seating aarrangement. At the beginning of the school year she allowed students to chooose their own seats, so you can imagine where all the high and low achieving students decided to sit. in addition to that, there were also a few groups of friends that gathered together. One of those groups included Tone and his friends. At this point, Tone was not the only student that was a distraction to the class due to talking. I warned the class and let them know that if things didn't change, I was going to change the seating arrangement. Understandably, they were against that option. After two weeks, I decided that the best thing for the class was to change the seating arrangement. The new seating chart was almost in alphabetical order, with some students stategically placed. The new seating arrangement seemed to curb most of the distractive talking. Except for Tone.
Even though most of freinds were across the room, Tone has taken to talking to his friends from across the room. Again, never during class discussions, only during independent work sessions. As of lately, when I ask him to stop, he becomes somewhat confrontational. Nothing disrespectful, just always having something to say. Today I decided I needed to pull him aside and talk to him away from the rest of the class. I told him that I understood that he likes to socialize, but he needs to help me by being less distracting during class. But what really got his attention, is when I mentioned calling home. All in all, he said there would be less chatter from his side. I'm interested to see how things go tomorrow.

I'm a STAR!

These past two weeks we have been administering the STAR exams at Westmoor HS. The past two weeks have been challenging to me due to the block schedules that have been in effect during the testing. I have been a substitute at a school that had block schedules, but it wasn't up to me to come up with the lesson plans. Normally Westmoor has 55 minute periods, but with the block schedule the periods were about 80 minutes long. In order to prepare for these block periods, I decided to over prepare. Although I have enough content to cover the block, I still feel rushed because I want to fit everythng in the allotted time. Due to the scheduling, my classes only meet every other day, so although our meetings are longer, our time together for the week is ultimately shorter. With this in mind, I am forced to give the students more homework. I found it interesting that on our first day back to the normal schedule, I ran out of time during my lesson. I guess what i've llearned from this experience is that yoou must be flexible with these types of standardized tests. I felt like I had a sort of routine down with my students, and then a "monkey wrench" seemed to be thrown into my plans wwith these tests. I'm sure once i've been teaching for a while these tests won't be such a distraction, but for now they've really thrown me for a looop.