Students will be able to make inferences and draw conclusions about a text.
Today we talked about the differences between making inferences and drawing conclusions. We’re moving very slow in this informational text unit; too slow for some, but I really want to make sure they hit all major points and really absorb what I’m teaching. We listened to a podcast from Marketplace about a college day held in a school system in Cincinnati. The principal wanted to start the conversation about college as young as kindergarten, since so few kids even graduated high school, let alone went on to college. We made inferences about the type of neighborhood the school was in, and drew conclusions about the effectiveness of the program.
It also started a discussion about college in general; studies show that if a kid hasn’t decided he is going to college by eighth grade, the chances of him going at all are very slim. Many of my students figured they didn’t have to think about college until junior year; it was a surprise to discover that a) colleges look at a CUMULATIVE GPA, not just junior year (as in, “But I did really bad freshman year – will that matter?”). I explained that colleges care about the type of classes you take, not just your grades; a B in an AP course looks better to many schools than an A in a regular version. They also want to see extracurricular and community service activities. While this seemed completely intuitive when I was in high school, it seems like a lot of my kiddos never considered that a college will want to know what they did in their spare time. They wanted a day devoted to just talking about college, like the school in the podcast had. Hopefully post-standardized test season we can make this happen.
Leave a Reply