My First Year Teaching

Good morning scholars. Thank you to the students who were able to attend the in-class session. Here is a summary of the lecture: We are currently experiencing an economic downturn. Within our lives we've seen another contraction in 2007-2008, with earlier contractions in 1988 and of course during the period we are currently studying: The Great Depression. Classical economics calls this the contraction side of a Kuznets cycle. However, classical economics says these cycles are caused by variations in the supply TRENDS of labor and other resources; variations in productivity TRENDS relating to efficiency with which those supplies are used; and variations in the average intensity with which resources get used-- in other words variations in rates of unemployment. (Economics, Samuelson, McGraw-Hill, 1967. P. 244) The Samuelson text goes on to say that fiscal policy can provide relief for these conditions. As you progress in your education you'll hear this called Keynesian Econ...

This morning I wrote an angry letter to parents. What led up to this was students not passing open-book quizzes, and in fact answering questions with "IDK". IDK stands for I don't know. How the hell can a student get to the 8th grade and try to pass a quiz with IDK as an answer. Who the hell have they gone to school with? What these students try to do is retake the SAME quiz, asking one student to help them with the answers. Also, getting under my skin is the request of some of these students to get help raising their grade. Their grade, currently, is composed of readings and worksheets on the readings. That is about a third of their grade. And, it is marked as a binary: either you did it or not. The remainder of the work is the weekly quiz. One student asked why they didn't get points for a short answer on the quiz given that week. I've since decided that the tsunami of work that is being submitted, does not allow me to read and evaluate even short answer...