Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

In my Trig class I made them answer 60% of the same questions from the exam, with open notes this time. Of course some were still unprepared for it, and even though it would supplement the score of their exam, it probably wouldn’t help much.

There are at least three “fair” ways I can augment their low exam scores. First is just to add the points from their seatwork to their exam. I’ve done that before in another mechanics class for the College of Engineering around 5 years ago.

A second way is to pick whichever has the higher score to be recorded. I have personally never done this before, but it’s one way that the students can’t lose.

If the students knew about the first two ways I had thought of, they would have considered the last option, the one I eventually chose for them, to be the least advantageous for them. This is when the average of the exam and the seatwork is taken as their exam score. If their exam scores were low, they would still influence the overall percentage greater than the other two methods. Even if they got perfect in the seatwork, it would only pull up their standing so far. And the only way for them to get 100% would be to be perfect in both requirements.

Why did I choose this incentive, even though I was already thinking of announcing the first one at the end of the seatwork? Because two students showed up late: James, a chronic low performer and Brian, a habitual absentee. They started talking in the back despite the fact that I wrote on the board about no consultation with classmates.

Brian’s parents, in fact, went to school the other week. Their son (the man’s stepson, to be accurate) kept leaving the house saying he was attending class, when, in actuality, we, his teachers, tell a different story.

In a discussion with the dean, the stepfather said given the kid’s bad grades in the first trimester, he asked the boy what he wanted to do with his life. The boy had said he wanted to finish college.

I gave the suspicion that Brian may have believed he needed to tell his mother’s husband what he wanted to hear.

The mother said that the kid is actually smart enough to pick up immediately on what the teachers are discussing, and gets impatient when his classmates ask the lesson to be repeated. This is verified by the fact that he got third highest in our first quiz in Trig. (Of course, Maila says, it’s his third take.)

The dean suggested to the parents to ask the boy again what he really wanted; that they’re willing to take him out of school if his heart isn’t into it (not as a punishment) rather than waste tuition money. It wasn’t a good time for me to suggest to the dean about initiating an honors’ class for such fast learners.

As I left the dean’s office the boy was called to go there. I guess the options were laid out for him, and given that he’s still attending my class every once in a while, either he chose to keep “studying” or they gave him until the end of the school year to decide based on his grades.

Either way, he’s still not putting enough effort into his schoolwork, and I can’t abide by that any longer. He’ll have to take the consequences of his actions.