Thursday, December 08, 2011

National Novel Writing Month and Homework

Hi guys,
I feel like I haven't posted anything in quite a while and wanted to quickly update on two things which I hope sort of explain my long silence:
1. I have slain the beast that is finishing NaNoWriMo! For those of you who aren't familiar with it, National Novel Writing Month is a challenge to write 50,000 words (in a novel) in the month of November. I started work on my novel, Truth and Beauty, five days into the challenge and managed to finish a couple days early (out of necessity, since I was leaving on a trip to Colorado and California for two speeches). Oh yes--the speeches should also help explain the silence on here :) I will post more about my travels once I have finished the second thing, which is
2. Catching up on homework. I have a feeling I will have stuff left over to do on Winter Break. Mostly AP Art History stuff...writing 12 art criticisms in one night is no mean feat (although definitely not specific just to me--pretty much everyone else does exactly the same thing)...plus a biology test tomorrow, AP US History, AP Lit. and Comp., Geometry, and French. Yeah, I will definitely be doing work over Winter Break too.
I'd love to hear your opinion on homework and testing. I had the thought as I started studying for my tests coming up that tests don't necessarily test authentic learning--more realistically, they test how much studying you did the night before. However, if we don't use bubble-ins, how do we get results for data and research purposes? Better assessment was quite a hot topic at both of the two education conferences where I was presenting this week.