Baggetta_Ware Ramblings
April
1, 2007
Volume I
No
this is not an April fool’s joke
Hi,
folks. Welcome to the first edition of Baggetta_Ware Ramblings. Starting with
this issue I’m going to include some little tidbits about teaching. Some will
be tips I’ve picked up over 36 years of teaching English on the high school
level. There will also be news of little discoveries I’ve made about advances
in technology that will help teachers and students. I’ll also include some
anecdotes that might provide a chuckle for new and experienced teachers alike,
and I’ll keep you up to date on the workings of
Baggetta_Ware and our latest offerings, including our monthly FREEWARE
program. Feel free to write me with comments about the newsletter and the
software along with suggestions you might have for new programs that will help
making teaching a little bit easier.
HEADLINE: NEW TEACHER
LEARNS A LESSON (c.
1970)
I was reading an article on
student cheating the other day (yes – some of them do “fudge” when they get a
chance), and it reminded me of an early experience I had as a second-year
teacher. It’s a bit amusing, but I thought it might illuminate a possible
problem when giving exams and maybe you could use a good laugh at my expense.
I’ve always liked giving daily quizzes when my students were given
reading assignments – kept them on their toes, I thought. As I walked around
the room up and down the aisles administering a quiz one day I thought to myself
how cunning I was. These kids knew I was going to test them daily, so they
definitely would do the reading. (How naive was that?) And from what I had
seen so far over the last week my plan was working.
Well, I liked to patrol the class while the kids were working and
this session I was rounding the front of the second row, and I noticed the girl
in the front seat hovering over her test. Boy, I thought to myself, has this
test got her thinking – look at that concentration. Poor kid must have been
burning the midnight oil to make sure
she passed this one.
I settled against my desk watching her, and she must have felt the
vibes traveling through the air because she sheepishly looked up at me, still
hugging the area around her test. The other kids were diligently working, so I
quickly gave her a “hello” wave of my hand.
Must have caught her off guard because she held up her left hand
(the one without the pencil) and with a windshield wiper movement waved back at
me. Suddenly she went pale because she understood that her wave was showing all
of the answers to the quiz -- imprinted on her palm. She quickly realized her
mistake and plopped her hand down on the desk – drawing the attention of the
whole class and Baggetta.
I had already caught her dead to right, but I asked to see her hand
more closely. Reluctantly she showed it to me (this was before students got all
those rights), and I was amazed that she had all of the correct answers, in the
exact order I had them on the test.
When I asked her how she knew what questions I would ask in the
exact order, her reply was that a friend of hers in my previous class gave them
to her, from a list she had made while taking the test. Then they put their
heads together to come up with the correct answers.
My first thoughts were that’s nonsense. No student is going to
take the time to write down all the answers to a test, probably fail it in the
process, and then give the answers to her friend so she can get a 100%.
Wrong -- turns out, as the girl innocently explained, that she would return the
favor at another time in a similar fashion.
So, I learned two lessons that morning that I’ve followed
continually from then on: It’s a good idea to give quizzes daily to consecutive
classes, but they will have to be different quizzes for each class (a lot
of work until I invented my literary test generators). Watch your students
very carefully when giving a quiz – not for what they might be using so much
as what they might be taking with them when they leave.
Multiple Test Generation On Demand
You might want to give our
literary and social studies test generators a whirl. They allow you to
generate many variations on a quiz, test or worksheet and the answer keys make
correcting a breeze.
Speaking of Test Generators. We have another new Literary Test
Generator available at Baggetta_Ware:
Jane Eyre Test Generator. This one is for Charlotte Brontë’s popular
classic Jane Eyre. When you get a chance you might want to take a look
at it in more detail at our
website.
Books of Interest
I mentioned in the bar above that Harper Lee was born in April and there is a
new book out about this mysterious writer. The tile is
Mockingbird and the author is Charles Shields. If you teach the book
To Kill a Mockingbird in your classes, you’ll want to take a look at this
work. It’s one of the very few books that really delve into the life of the
author and points out many of the origins of the events that take place in the
work of fiction.
William
Shakespeare was also born in April, and there is another fascinating read (and
rather short as Shakespeare biographies go) by James Shapiro. The title is
A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. Shapiro does an excellent
job of presenting the important year 1599 in the life of The Bard. The text
itself was quite interesting, but it is enhanced with several additions at the
end of the book: About the Author, About the Book, and Read On – all give
interesting insight to the work and the author. You can pick this book up in
paperback and use it as a handy reference to Shakespeare’s most popular plays.
It’s even available as an
audio book you can run on your computer or CD player.
New Windows FREEWARE now available for April
My FREEWARE
program this month is a handy little device I invented to cure a common problem
in my classes. Many times when studying writers and their works of literature I
found it beneficial to have students do some group research and reporting. This
was always fun, and it cut down my correcting load by tons, especially if most
of the work was presented orally. If you haven’t yet tried it, give it a
whirl. I’m sure you’ll be doing much more of it. All you need is a good rubric
for grading and you’re off and running. We’ve posted
two free generic rubrics at our site if you’d like to check them out.
Fine, Baggetta, but let’s get back on track. Okay. I always
encountered a problem when organizing groups. John didn’t want to work with
Eddie because they didn’t get along. Mary didn’t want to work with Elizabeth
and Francie because they were part of a clique that she didn’t belong to. Mrs.
Gildflap contacted me after the last grouping and made it very clear that her
son Portnoise was not to be grouped with Philip because this young man has no
ambition and would only pull Porty down with him – although I think Porty was
doing a good enough job of pulling himself down already.
I tried to be fair when I selected groups, but there was always the
suggestion that I was favoring someone, insensitive to dire needs, unaware of
social standings, and completely unable to apply the group method because
there was so much diversity in the world, and I would only be hurting someone’s
self-esteem. Go figure.
One day when I was mulling over this predicament I thought that it
would be great if there was a computer program that would decide randomly who
would be in whose group. It would make the decisions completely unencumbered by
acquaintances, intelligence, and social standings – everybody was equal by
computer standards -- and I would be almost out of the picture.
I found that there were computer programs that did this very deed,
but they were rather expensive and time-consuming to learn. So, I dusted off my
Visual Basic programming suite and put together Group Mixer (now
developed as Group Mixer2 and offered as freeware).
I used it quite a few times when I was teaching, and while it did
not resolve all of the emotional connections involved with grouping, it did
eliminate a lot of the pressure of making group selections. You’ll have to make
up the project and rubric yourself, but I offer this simple program here for you
to use, and I hope you find it a handy tool in your arsenal of educational
software.
Click here to download the program directly to your Windows PC from our website
– scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the free program icon. Please
let me know how it goes with you and the program, if you use it in your classes.
Teachers Mentor and Earn
Money With Their Lessons
The last issue of NEA Journal cited Paul Edelman’s site
Teachers Pay Teachers as a new way for teachers to connect with other
teachers through lessons they offer. Teachers can sell their lesson plans (I
know this sounds mercenary, but hey, teachers have to eat too), and they can
also buy plans, tests, projects, etc. that they might need. This seems to me an
interesting way of mentoring both ways: Experienced teachers get to pass
on their legacy of knowledge and new teachers get to introduce new ideas to the
older generation of teachers. Seems like a win-win situation to me. If you
haven’t visited
Teachers Pay Teachers yet, take a look. You might find it educational.
GREAT NEWS -– BAGGETTA_WARE PRODUCTS NOW DOWNLOAD IMMEDIATELY TO YOUR
WINDOWS PC.
Many of our
customers have been asking for immediate download availability when they order
from our site. Well, until now if you ordered after 10 PM EST you probably had
to wait until the next morning (since I usually turned in about that time). You
could order throughout the night, as many did, but the download link would not
arrive until the next morning. WELL WAIT NO MORE. Now when you order a program
using PayPal (or your credit card) you will be able to DOWNLOAD IMMEDIATELY to
your Windows PC. No more waiting. This means you can get right to using our
great products as fast as your machine will let you. When you order, simply pay
for the item through Pay Pal (using your account or credit card). When the
process is finished you will see a link that says RETURN TO MERCHANT OR RETURN TO BAGGETTA_WARE or
RETURN TO BAGGETTA_WARE. Click this link and you will be taken to a
download page from where you will be able to download the product you
purchased. You no longer have to wait for Baggetta to roll out of bed. If you
encounter any problems (which you shouldn’t) please send me an email and I’ll
get back to you as soon as possible.
NEWS FROM BAGGETTA_WARE
Unfortunately,
due to the complex nature of Windows Pocket PC development, we will no longer be
programming for these devices, and we will be dropping all of our current line
so that we can concentrate on developing software for Windows PC. We will still
offer support however for anything you have purchased in the past.
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TWO BONUS
FREE DOWNLOADS AVAILABLE THIS MONTH
If you’d like to add some excitement to your next boring faculty or in-service
meeting download our
TEACHER INSERVICE LINGO card printer. Instructions are included with the
download. You and your fellow faculty members will love it.
Also if you’d like a free copy of our pass printing and tracking database
program called
PASSTRACKER LITE, just recommend our site to a friend and you will be able
to download this unique program right to your machine.
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If you need a test quickly you can now find many assorted literature
tests ready made and available for most word processors. Check out our new
Literary Exams Page to see the current selection of tests available.
We have also released
Interactive Mice and Men as a compliment to our popular
Mice and Men Test Generator. You can check this great program which can be
used as an on-screen test or study guide in your classes or in your computer
lab. While visiting us, check out all of our other
Interactive Reading Programs.
We had to do a fix on the
Huckleberry Finn Test Generator – Question 3 was ambiguous, but it has now
been straightened out. If you are a current user of the program and would like
the free upgrade of the program, please contact us at
abaggetta@comcast.net telling us when and where you purchased the program
and we will send the new download link.
Visit our website and check out our new
Butterfly buttons. I took this picture last summer and thought it would
make a good inaugural for the spring and summer months. Clicking on these will
lead you to our pages on Interactive Reading Software, Classroom Management
Software, Literary Exams, and much more.
Well that’s about it for now. We hope you like our new Ramblings
and we hope to visit you again next month with more features. Please send us an
email letting us know what you think of our new format and if you have any
suggestions to make this newsletter more useful.
Best
Al Baggetta
Baggetta_Ware
Teacher Tech
www.baggetta.com
Tel. 413.786.8241
eMail:
abaggetta@comcast.net
177 Adams Street
Agawam, MA
01001
U.S.A.