Anna is one of our most consistently high-achieving students. After she and her classmates in her Introductory 2 class had taken turns reading aloud from part of the portion of My Dad’s a Birdman that we’re covering this week, we asked them to answer the first question in class.
Anna was not the first to finish answering the question, but her response was the best. She alone managed to craft a completely correct, error-free response. Anna went on to amass the highest in-class score and, when we concluded the lesson, we were thrilled to award her a small prize (a fun toy often referred to as a “flat kaleidoscope”) as a way of recognizing her efforts.
Occasionally taking a few minutes during lessons to answer one or two homework questions unassisted and within a fixed time span is useful because it acts as a check on the tendency of some families to provide too much or the wrong sort of assistance to their children with homework (bluntly stated: feeding the young person answers rather than discussing the assigned reading and guiding their child while they discover answers to the questions for themselves). It also helps give us a feel for how well our students are understanding the materials that we’re reading so that we can adjust the pace and difficulty of our courses.
The title of this entry is a reference to the classic children’s guessing game I spy.