[etni] project woes 2005

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Yes, it's that time of year again.  Same class this year -- they're
just a year older.  More sophisticated project.  The project itself
seems to be going well, but there have been so many snags along the
way.

For starters, here's something I hadn't thought of before -- what
happens when the teacher gets sick???  I had barely started the
project with my class and then I found myself home sick for an entire
week.  This threw off the entire project schedule (though it did give
my very industrious students a chance to look for more material and
get started without me).  So much for carefully planning things so
that we'd be done before the class trip.  *sigh*

Problem number two...  We teach our classes in "hakbatzot".  That
means that I have students from four different homeroom classes in my
5-point class.  One of the homeroom classes (or maybe it was one of
the "hagbarot" -- not necessarily the same thing) had a trip that I
knew nothing about and a bunch of kids were out of school on one day
of the project.

Then one kid had some course that she had to do (approved by the
school) that was during English class.  She missed another day of the
project.

Then there was the school musical.  I had planned it so that the first
drafts would be handed in before the performances so that the kids
participating wouldn't be performing during project time.  But because
of my own illness, I ended up with several kids out of school this
entire week.  The members of their groups insist that they ARE working
on the project at home, but since I haven't seen them all week, I have
no idea what they're really doing.

This musical caused other problems.  Technically, the 11th graders
went to see it last night at 6.  But some of them had a test today, so
they were given permission to go today.  When?  During English of
course!  *sigh*

Then there was the library being unexpectedly closed.  The kids who
needed to use the library on that day were stuck.

And if all of that wasn't problematic enough, out of 33 students, I
had no fewer than 15 absent on one or more days because of illness.

For the most part, the groups kept working despite the missing group
members.  But one group had three of its four members missing on at
least two days and the remaining member ended up working by himself
(and not doing too much).  In addition, this group never actually got
around to giving me their outline (despite having a deadline for
showing it to me) and from what I've seen so far, their project isn't
going to be very impressive.

I've found this problem of absenses due to both illness and school
activities (of which there are so many that they're impossible to
completely avoid) to be a real barrier to doing effective, meaningful
project work.  I can't penalize a kid for participating in the school
musical or for being on a mandatory trip or for being ill, but all of
things really prevent them from doing the amount and quality of work
that they should be doing.

How do the rest of you overcome this problem?

Bari
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