I don't know what happened between the end of Quarter One and the start of Quarter Two, but my classroom just hasn't been the same. I went from having 7 average-and-above achieving students and 1 I-know-he's-smarter-than-he-lets-on-but-he-just-won't-do-the-work student to having 3 average-and-above students and 5 failing-because-they-won't-do-the-work students.
I honestly have no idea what happened. The students themselves have told me the work isn't that hard. For example, this quarter, they're writing an 8-10 page research paper. They have the entire quarter before Winter Break to write this paper. At the same time, they're reading Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing" since we're in the Renaissance time-wise. They usually read a couple scenes over a three-night period (and these are short scenes. Some of them are only a little over a page or a page and a half long) and then come in and act out those scenes. That's the extent of what I'm pushing them to do with Shakespeare right now. Read and then come in and act it out.
While they do that, they've also got their paper to think about. So far, they've had to come up with a topic (they all did), find me 10 sources that they will use to get information about that topic with at least 3 of those 10 being book sources (they've all done this, though two students took two extra weeks and multiple prompts from me to do it), write an annotated bibliography (basically write me a paragraph for each source and tell me how you're going to use it in your paper) (three students did this and I gave them two weeks [that's less than one paragraph a day]), and finally write me 20 note cards (each card being the equivalent of: 3 bullet points or one long quote from the source) (three [the same three students] did this [and I've told them multiple times that they should be constantly taking notes and that they should have started taking notes on day 1 of the project]).
Is that too much to ask of them? The three students who turned in the work have all said they don't know what the fuss is about because it honestly was pretty easy to do. When I asked the other students why they hadn't done it, I got blank stares and shrugs.
Right now, my class average is a 64%. I repeat: my class average score is a failing grade.
This is completely unacceptable. I just wish I knew how I could get the kids who aren't doing the work to realize they need to be doing it. Hopefully the fact that their grades are now all completely entered into the online gradebook, their parents will see that they're failing and do something about it. I'm at a loss.
