During today' s session Joshua, Miss Nicole, and I met to in depth discuss English curriculum course options for next year. Miss Nicole elaborated on the available DE courses and the GPA benefits of DE and AP courses. We further discussed the absence of literature in the available DE composition courses. I provided Joshua with an AP Lit guide for his review and shared my concerns about the AP course content and testing . While Joshua will continue reviewing his options tonight, we were leaning toward a DE comp Course over the summer, a second DE comp course for first semester senior year, and a Lit course(DE or otherwise) for second semester senior year.
Today we looked up his SAT score of 1380 and looked at the breakdown of the subject areas and his performance. We saw that he got 7/8 in every single math topic, so that informed us that we will still focus on all topics but the challenging topics within each. We pulled problems from his practice book. We covered a few topics on various subjects involving Algebra.
In today’s class, we discussed functional groups as they are seen in organic chemistry. We recapped the basics we already know, such as the hydrocarbon groups, and went over some new ones, such as thiols, primary, secondary, and tertiary alcohols, and phenol groups. We talked about how they differ both chemically and in terms of reactivity.
I asked Joshua if he wanted to continue working on FRQs, do SAT Prep, or start more into learning about Limits. He chose to work on SAT Prep. We pulled problems from a practice test I had. We discussed statistics, probability, and various geometry problems. He told me he scored a 13-- on his first attempt at the SAT and I am so impressed! Now he can only go up from here!
We reviewed more pages of Joshua's draft research paper during today's session. I recommended adding an additional term to the definitional section given the content of the text and ,more critically, I emphasized the need to incorporate commentary on the research rather than merely citing the research results. I provided examples of the types of commentary that might be useful and discussed how the commentary offers the writer a chance to shape the paper to his individual ideas and thesis.
The college board has released the FRQs from the exam. So Joshua and I printed out copies for each of us and got started on them. The first problem Joshua feels confident he got 6/6 points on. I showed him how to do the problems, step by step. He agreed and felt he did the same thing on the exam. The second problem, he ran into some issue with. He might have gotten 2/6 points. I was surprised they asked it, because it involved a lot of Algebra 2 techniques. When I explained it to Josh, he understood, but he wasn't able to think about it himself. Still so far 8 out of 12 points is great. We will continue to go through them next class.
Current events German news station Deutsche Welle with authentic German news from the 16th along with an accompanying text and set of online questions completed. Subject matter was about Kaffee and the Klimawandel - climate change affects on coffee production.
