All students began the day with the third ELA benchmark test that the district mandates. As a result of spending the first two-and-a-half hours of school testing (for about the fifth time for benchmarks alone), all classes were only thirty minutes.

As students tested, I worked on grading the district-mandated second TDA, given through Mastery Connect.

The exceptionally poor design of the website makes it very time-consuming to assess essay questions on Mastery Connect, so I was not even able to get one class’s TDAs assessed during that time. (I say all this to explain to students why this process is taking ridiculously long.)

Once classes began, English I students finished up their R&J projects and turned them in. Most students’ essays were between 900 and 1,500 words, and the content is very challenging and analytical. “This is undoubtedly the most challenging and likely the longest thing you’ve ever written. It’s something you should be proud of,” I told the students. If you haven’t read your child’s essay, you’d probably be surprised at how much your child’s writing has improved this year.

English 8 students continued reading The Diary of a Young Girl. We’ve been revisiting old effective readers’ skills with this unit, and today, we added a new one: Questioning the Text.

We’ll continue working on these skills as we continue with Anne Frank.

Homework

• English 8 Studies: none.
• English I Honors: 
  • work on No Red Ink as needed;
  • read Mockingbird through chapter 20 (by Friday);
  • answer Mockingbird questions for 9-12 and 13-16 on Moodle.