Day 107: What’s fair?

Students will be able to analyze a text for main idea, details, author purpose, perspective, argument, evidence.

For the next five days, my students will be testing.  The first day is my test on informational texts.  I don’t think this one is a big deal; they get to use their study guides, and I tried to include cool articles, like this one about the manhunt in LA, or this one from TeenInk.com.  I would think they’d rather read about that than, say, the inhabitants of the Sahara Desert or service dogs, both of which have shown up in other standardized tests they’ve had to take this year.  

Once they finish my test, they take the five-day benchmark test to gauge how some of them will do on the state tests later this year.  Five straight days of testing.  Poor kids.  There’s rumors of the legislature passing a bill that will reduce the required number of tests they need to pass to graduate (it’s currently set at 15).  Our entire core teaching staff has many, many fingers crossed.

While they test in rigorous silence today, I am mulling over what it means to treat my students fairly. On Thursday I gave them a study guide to fill out from their notes.  Because many misplaced their notes, we went over all the answers to the study guide on Friday.  On Friday and Monday I told them they MUST have the study guide in class today.  If they couldn’t find it, they better come to tutorials after school or make a copy of one of their friend’s.  If they didn’t have it today they’d be out of luck.  No one showed up after school.  Thus, I incorrectly assumed they’d keep track of it.

Wouldn’t you know it, I still had half a dozen kids who couldn’t keep track of two pages of paper over the course of a weekend.  Naturally, the students who didn’t even need it had theirs.  These half dozen kids are the ones barely passing my class anyway.  So I’m left wondering which is more fair: making sure everyone has the same resources to take a test (which would mean lending my disorganized kiddos a spare study guide) or rewarding those who were organized with an easier test?  Technically they all started with the same resources, as they had three different days to obtain and fill out the study guide.  Two students in one period made a valiant effort to look for their study guide, implying that they really thought they had it.  I caved and gave them an extra copy in the last ten minutes of class to check some of their answers.  However, the rest who just shrugged when I asked them where their study guide was didn’t get my mercy – is that fair?  Am I “letting” them fail, or did they fail themselves?  It seems like schools spend so much time and energy and money trying to give kids an “equal” education, but if the kids don’t want it, should the schools be punished for having failing kids?


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I’m debating signing up for Pandora One so I don’t get ads.  Since I predominantly listen to it in my classroom while my students are doing work, could I write it off on my taxes as a classroom expense?  Third period prefers my ZZ Top station; fourth period likes my Taylor Swift station; seventh likes my George Strait station.  One girl in seventh keeps lobbying for a Justin Bieber station, but I have to exercise my authority somewhere.