Reply to 9th grade honors English update

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I co teach with two different 9th grade Honors English teachers and one of them assigned a full novel to read while the other we read excerpts of a graphic novel in class.  The class with the full novel had one student out of 20 earn an A for the MP and 14 of them failed for the quarter.
I get the feeling from my colleagues that we would like to assign more reading and work in general but it is difficult to explain to admin and parents that doing so will result in more than half the class failing the course.[/quote]
Sounds like a lot of kids should not be in Honors English. [/quote]
This.  Co-teacher PP are you in a high poverty school?  Is the full novel teacher a rookie?  Does your school offer non-honors English 9?  [/quote]

This is the co-teacher here.  I am actually the first year teacher and both English teachers i teach with have done this for at least 6 years.  We do not offer non honors english as honors for all seems to be a county wide policy.

The biggest thing i noticed with the full novel class is that the teacher who has established the schedule and pacing for the class has set it up so all reading is done at home with very little to no in class check for understanding.  The students are given a week to read 70 pages and complete an assignment based on those pages.  Rinse repeat for 4 chunks.  I had 2 out of 20 students complete all 4 assignments, 4 students complete 2 of them, and 14 do none of them.  That data isn’t just specific to the reading.  All 4 of my classes of 9th graders complete and turn in roughly about 20% of work that is not done entirely in class.[/quote]

Do you have a sense of why so few of them are doing any work outside class, and whether this is an issue of kids struggling to adjust from low demands in MS to higher demands in HS, or a broader issue that will likely continue throughout HS?

Also, curious how high the FARMS rate is at your school?[/quote]

I worked in middle schools primarily before becoming a HS teacher this year and I 100% believe the biggest issue is the lack of educational consequences leading up to 9th grade.  Unless a student has tiger parents, they are conditioned to do the bare minimum at all costs.  Even my strong students are demanding to know word count and sentence minimums.  If we say 400-600 words, every single student, to include the kids with high MAP scores, is counting words and without fail will be no more than 10 words over the minimum.[/quote]

I find its the lack of curriculum, teaching, kids not recieving a good foundation in ES, and [b]lack of books[/b].  [/quote]

Nope. Not in Montgomery county where there are many books at the school media center, classrooms, and a fab county public library system. Many little free libraries too in neighborhoods. Book drives. Books are plentiful. Priorities to read questionable. Books versus screens. Books on screens or paper books.[/quote]

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