Students of the Month: December 2014

Both of these young ladies are “top o’ the class” in all respects: excellent students, conscientious workers, good attitudes, etc.,  -- just the sort of stuff you would expect students of the month to be.  As members of the Honors English class, they both live up to the great academic expectations the class calls for, and they are both unfailingly pleasant and polite.  But when it came time to nominate people for this recognition, I looked carefully at my rolls, and I chose each of these students for a very specific reason.

Corinne Curtis has set herself apart from the beginning of the year.  She never does anything half-way or half-hearted.  Even on the simplest assignments, she will write lengthy, thoughtful responses to things that most of her classmates find hardly worthy of a word.  In fact, she has written more on her reading assignments than many students write in their essays!  Whenever a student approaches me with the question “Why didn’t I get full credit?” on an assignment that was incomplete or sloppily done, I display the one Corinne did.  She may not know this, but I have been scanning many of her assignments all year to show off in the future when I need a model for students to follow.

Kylee Head distinguished herself recently with a remarkable test score.  The ninth grade Honors English class is reading the novel Jane Eyre, a challenging book for many reasons.  In the interest of preparing the students for the AP Literature tests they will face a couple years from now, I recently gave them a pre-AP test based on a couple passages from the novel.  It was a very difficult test that never asked what happened in the story, but required the students to make inferences, draw conclusions, and identify and analyze complex literary elements.  After scoring the test, I realized there were certain questions that were unfairly ambiguous, so I threw them out and raised the scores of those who missed them.  Even accounting for those “bonus” points, the class average was only  13/20, with some scores less than ten and few above 15.  But Kylee had the highest unadjusted score in the class: a remarkable 19/20! That feat coupled with her consistently excellent performance in all other areas of the class earned her this recognition.