FIAE Chapter 3

The common theme of this particular chapter is assessment with pre-assesment being the most vital component. From reading all of the abstracts, I see that students are more like raw materials like trees: the teacher's job is to turn them into lumber that can be used to build a home, a table or even a child's clubhouse. this analogy is similar to what a teacher is supposed to do: turn students in the classroom into functioning members of society much like lumber mills turn trees into building material. Perhaps the most important part of processing is assessing the raw material: most of you said that giving the blank unit test out during day one was one of the best ways of doing this; this is a good idea to do so but some of you also said that weekly or even daily assessment is required to do the job right. Both ways are, in fact, effective in test how we should chop up our oak tree so it can be made into a functioning cabinet. As a mill, we have to assess our raw materials so we may optimize their use: it makes no sense to waste supplies that are perfectly good. We need to continue to assess our manufactured material to make sure we are doing our job right: in some schools of thought, this is known as coaching. We, as teachers, can optimize the success of the student by knowing the level that they are at and by checking up on them with little quizzes and such. If we do our job right, the student will not end up as a literal piece of lumber.

Many of you agreed with this chapter and so did I: I believe in doing a "damages" check before the unit and assessment along the way. I actually got something different from the chapter entirely: utilizing the building blocks or perhaps I just have a different take on this chapter. I thought that with pre-assessment, the lesson can work in intricate parts that build the unit: kind of like assembling a model. In all, your reactions said that pre-assessment is vital to a student's education and and that the student should be quizzed along the journey that is the education of a unit.