Why Do We Have to Do Work, Testing Is Over?

courtesy of Pixabay CC0 Public Domain

My students are filled with righteous indignation this morning. Their high dudgeon is the result of finding out they have to do work, not only this morning, but this whole week. The students are under the impression that they should not have to do any work now that final exams and End-of-Grade Tests are over.

It was my pleasure to dissuade my students of that notion right off the bat. When they found out what the “work” they were going to be doing was, the students attitude about having an assignment changed. The assignment for the week is for the students to build a balloon powered racecar.

Building a balloon powered racecar, without using any actual model or toy car parts, is not as easy as one may think. It certainly wasn’t as easy as my students thought it would be, nor as easy as the video we watched made it look.

The materials available to the students were plastic water bottles, bottle caps, straws, plastic string, paperclips, glue, and balloons. The students came up with many interesting ways to assemble these cars. Unfortunately, none of them worked very well. I challenged the students to figure out what would work better, and to find it at home and bring it in tomorrow.

Because we are still on a modified schedule due to 8^th grade testing going on in the computer labs, my first class wound up staying with me most of the day. It is nearly impossible to keep middle school students working on a single project for several hours. Even I began to get bored with the effort after a while.

In keeping with the idea of keeping to the Science curriculum in these last few days of the school year, my students and I put the balloon racers away and are now engaged in a marathon session of “Grossology.” The show is disgusting, funny, and educational regarding some of the more stomach churning aspects of biology.

“Grossology” also succeeded in keeping the students engaged and relatively quiet, for a time anyway. Eventually, the grossness became more than some of the queasier stomachs could handle. It was at that point I switched to Social Studies and we replaced our “Grossology” marathon with a “Time Warp Trio” marathon.

I only hope that tomorrow the schedule will be back to something approaching normal so I will get to see my other classes.

As always, I remain,

The Exhausted Educator