There were two students in the back of the room talking. Loudly. Furiously. It was fine.
You see, a couple weeks ago we had a class retrospective: List one thing that you thought went well last semester and one thing that we could do differently. The responses were varied, but the most frequent suggestion was for more practice time. Accordingly, today we had 30 minutes of practice time at the end of the period (more than usual, enabled by block scheduling).
Our room is laid out in 4-desk pods. Over the course of the year, the kids have gradually migrated from the initial seating chart to groups of their own devising. On a good day, their work is productive. On a great one, the room is filled with academic conversation, and they teach each other. Today was a great day.
The pods were at work factoring polynomials and then solving equations. Factor on the left, solve on the right. Rinse. Repeat. All the way down the page. And those two kids in the back were discussing one of the problems near the end. It was a difficult one (as they tend to be toward the end). There they were, the two of them: factoring, solving, leaning into each other. Scratching their heads. Each asking what the other was doing. Then one of them spoke.
“Wait,” the first one said to the second one there, shuffling papers on the desk between them. “Where’s your work?”
Oh be still my beating heart.