Pop Quiz Turn Off

This week, I took my first pop quiz. I kind of knew that it wasn't the most important quiz of my life and that the teacher only gave it to us to make his point, but none the less, it made me really think about the demands to give students. All week we talked about rigor and compassion, and before these classes I always considered to myself that pop quizzes didn't sound that bad and that I didn't see much harm in them. But this week taught me that my teaching rigor should be more focused towards learning and helping, rather than trying to trick them into making them learn. It was a switch inside of me that went off.