Your answer is what??

The last month of school.  Teachers are exhausted.  Kids are restless.  Who can blame either?  

Sometimes, however, students are getting a little... spacey.  I spent two weeks with my students studying the 1920s - a perfect fit after researching World War I.  We learned about gangsters, prohibition, women's rights, inventions, etc.  It was a pretty fun unit.  There are a lot of entertainment related topics we covered as well, including slang vocabulary, jazz music, silent films, and dancing.  

This past Friday, I gave my students a quiz on the Roaring Twenties to wrap up our unit.  Here's what a chunk of it looked like:

Take a closer look at number 11:

Do you know it?  Drum-roll please............. "The Charleston" !  I showed all of my students several clips of people dancing the Charleston.  A few of my classes were even able to try a "How-to" video where they tried to learn how to dance themselves.  It was quite comical.

Anyways.  Back to it being the end of the year.  I've noticed that with middle schoolers, especially eighth graders, they tend to "check out" of school a little early.  They were mortified with the fact that I actually DO have things planned for us the last seven days of class time we have left.  As if I would even THINK about teaching them something!  :)

Well, question #11 proved to be quite a tricky one, I guess.  Considering we watched a video and some actually tried to do the dance, it shouldn't have been.  But looking back on the final grades, I have no D's or F's, and most students ended up with an A.  I'll count my losses and instead, show you what I found so funny.......  Brace yourself.....

I'd also like to add that these colorful answers came from ONE class of thirty students.  One class!!!  My other five had the right answer 90% of the time.  It's almost as if this class tried to pull a fast one on me.  Like I said, I'm going to count that one question as a loss - considering it's not an essential learning outcome to this unit, and laugh at these answers instead of cry.  It was a great way to wrap up my week and sure did make me giggle.  

Just wait until we have a little chat about this next week......

Emily  :)