For the past couple of years, planning our homeroom activities has been taken out of our hands. The practice is a mixed blessing, designed to both ensure consistency among teachers and to save us the time it would take to plan a daily 30 minute activity, some of the stuff they give us to do kind of misses the mark. I like to think that I can teach the hell out of almost anything, but when I can't? I just shrug and remind the students that it's not my activity, I'm just the messenger. It was a little like that this morning.
"You guys have a bazillion surveys to do this morning," I told my homeroom.
"Literally?" one kid asked in alarm.
"Well, no" I laughed, "but there are two."
"Two???" another kid said, "I thought there were going to be at least five when you said a bazillion."
"I guess I was thinking cumulatively," I confessed. "It seems like you have to do a couple of Google forms every day."
The students compliantly clicked the links I had provided, but they soon had a lot of questions. "What does it mean to give a quote?" someone asked. "Do I have to search a quote?"
"Does the person I vote for ever know if they don't win?"
"What the heck! How did I get a zero on that question? I thought it was asking my opinion! How can it be wrong to say I like my homeroom?"
"What if my favorite teacher isn't on this list?"
I did my best to field their inquiries, but obviously, they had a point. If your target audience doesn't understand what you are asking, you're not going to get the information you want. I wanted to roll my eyes at the ineptitude, but I shrugged my shoulders instead.
"It's not as easy as you might think to design a good question form," I told my class. "Teachers might make it look easy, but we have some skills!"
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