Economics

The test grades were sent out.  Shazaam!  (They were a little late... I had some issues with technology.)

I'm impressed by the report though.  If you didn't sign up to have your grades emailed to you, you should next time: tre cool.

We're in to economics now.  This is the definition I gave the kids:

After that, we simplified the definition.  (I also added services in after goods...)

So, we could say, "the economy deals with the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services."

Or, we could say, "the economy deals with the making, selling, and buying of stuff."  

I prefer the former, but for 7th graders the latter is easier to understand.

We discussed the difference between a good (or healthy) economy and a bad (unhealthy) economy:

And of course, we discussed Black Friday just a little bit.

I'm not a big fan of rampant consumerism.  I'm worried it's destroying our country.

But, of course, I'm glad people buy things.  If they didn't, where would we be?  It's because people buy that allows us to have jobs and a higher standard of living.  The problem comes in when "stuff" becomes more important than people.

To get the extra credit today, you should read and discuss the blog with an adult.  On a sheet of scrap paper, write a paragraph about your discussion.  Write your thoughts about the paragraph from above.  Do you agree?  Do you disagree?  Why?  What should we do about it?

Some classes also watched some videos about this topic.  Watch if you want to, but you don't have to for the blog credit if that's what you're here for:

Evaluating the Data/ Reteach/Retest

I'm sure you're all aware that the purpose of this blog is to reinforce what we do in class, and to keep parents and guardians up to date with what we're doing.

Occasionally I'll branch out from that, giving you all some insight into some of the other aspects of being a teacher.  (A collective groan goes up from the students reading this post...  'BORING!')

This is how the graded test spreadsheets came back to me:

The spreadsheet's actually really, really large - so I'll break it down a little bit.  It gives me student names, total points, percentages, etc...  If students scored below 70%, their names appear in orange.  In general, students did well on the test.

As you can see, it also gives me a breakdown by question.  If a student has a "1" that means they got the question right.  If you see a "0" that means they got the question wrong.

This is helpful because I can see deficiencies in learning.  For instance, in general the students fared well on the continents and oceans portion - even though I haven't really taught that since the beginning of the year:

If you look at the bottom of each column, it tells me the percentage of students who answered the question correctly.  Again, it's obvious that students know this section.

However, questions like #15 pose a problem:

Only 52% of my students answered it correctly.  It's easy for teachers to say, "well, the student just didn't study enough."  And that may be true for some questions - but when the majority of students miss the same question without bombing the test there's a good chance there's more to it than a simple "they didn't study" answer.  Perhaps I didn't teach the concept well enough.  Perhaps the wording of the question was ambiguous and could be misinterpreted.  Was it only one class that missed the question?  Was there a day that class missed due to a convocation, delay, etc...

For question #15 the problem was that the question had multiple parts.  Students had to locate a physical geographical feature using latitude and longitude.  If they didn't know how to use latitude and longitude, they got the question wrong.  If they didn't know what a peninsula was, they got the question wrong.  Since most of the students could answer the other latitude and longitude questions, I could deduce that they were/are weak on physical geography.

So, we spent the day going over the test.  I tried to focus on questions a lot of students missed.  I tried to identify why they missed those and address any issues they had.

Tomorrow we're going over the second portion.  Wish us all luck.  It was a big test.  It's a lot of data to review.

If you want extra credit for reading and discussing the blog, find a map of Iraq or Afghanistan online.  Write down the names of the countries that border Iraq.  Then write the names of the countries that border Afghanistan.  Have the adult you read the blog with sign the paper.

Thanks for reading.