Conference day

Today we had student led conferences. I've seen it done before, but it never went this well in the past. Kids were well prepared and the parents were happy.

Students in the upper school were given a template of PowerPoint slides. They only had to fill in the blanks for each class, sport, or after school activity.

• What have you done well?

• What do you need to do better?

• ATL** skills evaluation?

It was a super easy day for me. I sat at my desk and graded projects all day while kids took their parents through their slides. Most of them spoke to their parents in Chinese so I couldn't follow the conversation anyway.

** What's an ATL skill? ATL stands for approaches to learning. The ATL skills in an IB context are as follows:

• Thinking skills.

• Communication skills.

• Research skills.

• Social skills.

• Self-management skills.

IB schools put a big emphasis on teaching these skills. Teachers have to pick a specific skill to focus on for a unit and we evaluate students on how they did in this specific skill.

Students have an advisory period for 45 minutes at the end of every Tuesday. They were given several of these periods to work on their slides.

In other news we've got team trivia night again Thursday. Team name this week? Furious George. Fingers crossed for my dream categories. Hmmm. What would my dream categories be?

• NFL history

• American Civil War

• Mathematics

• 80s pop culture

• Movies

• NCAA basketball