I am curious as to your policies regarding late work. Will you take a moment and answer this poll (if you are so inclined)? Feel free to elaborate on your answers in the comments if you wish. The poll expires Monday evening.
Do you accept late work?
Total Votes: 87
Loading ...This week I am caught up on grading. I’ve seen lots of talk out there among the English Edublogosphere and Twitter about feedback on student writing. Something I do about once a semester is type comments as I read a student’s writing. I usually wind up with about a page when I’m done. It’s like a written conference. I wish I had more time for writing conferences in my schedule. I tried recording my feedback, and it felt like an awkward additional step. Because I have smaller classes, I am able to give substantial feedback on writing and still ask my students to do plenty of writing. That’s not to say it’s not a challenge to grade, but it’s such a reward when I can compare students’ progress. It’s really evident when I compare ninth graders’ writing to eleventh graders’ writing. It’s not that eleventh graders necessarily are inherently better writers, but I can see the growth that has taken place because I know they were writing like the ninth graders two years ago. Another thing I have done is allow students to revise for a higher grade. I gave my students a handout with Seven Deadly Sins — seven common grammatical issues I see in their writing — and a point value to be subtracted for each instance of the “sin” in their paper. They can erase their sins by figuring out what they did, correcting it, and attaching an explanation of their errors and corrections to the second draft. All is forgiven.
Right now my juniors are writing poetry explications. I don’t think I was asked to write an explication until I was in college. My freshmen are busily writing argumentative essays. My sophomores are in the midst of a research paper. Lots of writing going on!
I have really been enjoying the conversations with my department this week. Teaching can be so isolating, and it is good to connect and discuss with those who share the same burdens and joys that we do as a result of working in the same place. I feel sad when I hear stories of departments that aren’t close and refuse to collaborate.
My juniors read poetry (John Donne to John Milton) this last couple of weeks, and I was pleasantly surprised by the number of positive comments regarding the readings that they were making on the classroom blog. My students are generally, I believe, fairly honest about their likes and dislikes. When I was first exposed to these writers, I admit I didn’t care much for them. In fact, until college, I didn’t much care for writing before about 1800 or so. All that changed, and I actually find I like the older literature more now (go figure), but I have to admit that my teachers in high school did very little to engage me in that literature. I had one excellent English teacher in high school, and the rest of my English classes are a blur. I remember a lot of what I did with her because it was engaging and interesting. I hope I am not flattering myself too much to think I have actually engaged my juniors in Late Renaissance/Restoration poetry, but it feels good to read such positive comments.
What this post lacks in coherence chalk up to the fact that what I share is more or less stream of consciousness. Grad school is starting to get challenging. I’m learning, and I am enjoying my classes, but I can’t pretend it’s not difficult.
Georgia did away with the D in its public schools a long time ago. The reason I know this is that when I moved to Georgia as a junior in high school, which was almost exactly twenty years ago, I had a D in biology on my transcript, and my counselor explained that because it was a passing grade where I came from, the Georgia school to which I was transferring would consider it a passing grade; however, he let me know that grades below 70 were failing grades in Georgia. I guess that means if you go by the old dictum that A’s are excellent, B’s are above average, C’s are average, and F’s are failing, then in Georgia, you drop from average work to failing work if you find yourself on the other side of that 70.
Private schools, however, are free to retain the D, and my school uses the A-F +/- grading scale. I have to say that having worked with both scales, I believe the D has merit. There is a gap between average performance and failing performance, and I think the D serves that gap well. Below average. The warning before you fail. The impetus to do better. It’s a nice cushion for the students, and I think it might prevent grade inflation. I am almost sure a chemistry teacher in high school gave me a 70 I didn’t earn because I worked hard, was generally quiet, and turned in all my assignments. I just had a very hard time with the subject. I can’t really say my knowledge of chemistry was average as high school student. It was probably below average. Maybe it’s just me, but I see a difference between doing average work and doing failing work.
What do you think, though? Do D’s serve a purpose? Is Georgia wrong to delete the D?
Of the four classes I am taking this semester (three one-hour classes and one three-hour class), I have finished the work in three. That means I have just one more class to finish, and I will be done with the semester. Hopefully I can tidy that up this weekend and finish early.
I expect to earn A’s on my grade report. I have been able to keep up with my grades online through Blackboard and a separate interface the ITMA program uses for grade reporting and assignment submission (having three different interfaces to work with is clunky and is something I think the program needs to address). Three of the A’s I expect to earn really don’t mean much to me. I did a modest amount of work to earn them. In the case of one class, the assignments were a waste of time. I can’t say I learned a lot. In one class, I worked quite hard and feel proud of the A because it was not easy to earn. I also feel I learned a lot in that class.
You know, I really, really hate grades. I have been thinking about writing a book about assessment and grades. Grades are a subject that interest me a great deal. I hate the fact that grades are what motivates some students to learn — that unless there’s a grade attached, it isn’t worthwhile to some students. I hate it that I spend a long time on feedback and some students turn to the grade and ask why did I get this? instead of reading the feedback, which would make the grade clear.
I really like working with my students, and it’s so exciting when I can tell they’re truly interested in something, and they want to learn it for the sake of learning it. I find it frustrating that no matter how engaging my lessons might be (not every day, probably, but I hope they are most of the time) that some students will never be motivated by anything other than a grade.
A colleague of mine once described grades as both the carrot and the stick, and truer words were never spoken. We use grades to punish kids who don’t do the work, and to reward those who do, even if they are only doing it for the grade. I wonder what school would look like without grades. I know it’s possible. I know schools have done it.
I don’t know what made me go off on that rant. I suppose I feel frustrated by my own school experience. I have four A’s. I worked to earn one of those A’s. I didn’t learn much. The grade doesn’t feel like much of a reward. I’d rather have learned a lot. For what it’s worth, I hear the program gets better. Here’s hoping. I am taking Principles of Instructional Design, Instructional Media, and Digital Audio next semester.
Via this week’s NCTE Inbox, I read an article about an experiment in assessment that English teacher John O’Connor tried.
After spending 15 hours carefully crafting comments on a class set of papers, there’s nothing more depressing than to see those papers parachute, unread, into the recycling bin at the end of class.
This past school year, I swore, would be different: I would give no grades. I figured this would force students to read, absorb, and appreciate all the attention I had given their work, rather than just rely on a grade at the end of the paper.
O’Connor left cute stamps instead of grades on student work. Of course, they still tried to see what the value of each stamp was — “Is a flower worth more than a frog?” Parents worried. “[T]his was cute and all, but try explaining to a college that her son has a ‘raccoon’ in senior English.” Indeed.
Ultimately, such a system is very hard, if not impossible to defend, particularly in a school that does assign grades to students. I cannot imagine how an administrator could back up a teacher who tried such a system and then (as is likely) was challenged by a parent or student.
I wish there was a way we could eliminate grades as a means of communicating progress and rely instead on narrative and comments, but grades are very entrenched in our schools, and O’Connor’s system would only work if the entire school was behind the idea of eliminating grades. Many schools who use other means of assessment exist, and colleges do indeed accept these students.
Like O’Connor, I wish students would read the comments. I am frustrated when I spend a long time with a student’s work, giving what I feel is copious feedback, only to have the student turn to the grade and ask “Why’d I get a B?” At least students understand letter grades, and even if, as O’Connor insists, he and the student generally knew what the student’s letter grade was, I can’t imagine how I’d address the question “Why’d I get a frog? What is a frog, anyway?”
A conversation*:
“Mrs. Huff, are we going to do another project soon?”
“Fairly soon. I want to finish The Iliad.”
“I really like projects. I think they’re better than quizzes or tests because you really think about it and analyze it more.”
“I agree.”
“Plus I know when I study tests, I might do fine, but I forget it like a month later.”
“I know.”
“But with projects, I think about it from more angles and I enjoy it more.”
“We’ll do some more projects, but we have to do papers, too because composition is important.”
“Papers are cool, too. But I really like projects.”
Out of the mouths of babes.
*Paraphrased because I recount it here about 5 or 6 hours after it occurred.
I’ve said this every year, but I’ll say it again: you sure can tell when school starts again around this blog. Anyway, our students come back on Wednesday, and my own children went back today, so I feel like we’re all back in the saddle.
Meanwhile, I’ve had a few new visitors coming by looking for UbD information, and I thought I’d make it easier for you. First, these are my “reading journals” for Understanding by Design in which I reflected on what I was reading and posted here:
Of course, I invite and encourage any interested teachers to join us at the UbD Educators wiki to share and obtain feedback on unit plans (or perhaps borrow those shared by others).
Meanwhile, once I get back in the swing of my schedule, I should have more time to write, although I start grad school on the 25th, which I imagine will make me busy again.
Regular readers of my blog know I am really invested in backward design (Understanding by Design or UbD). I have several UbD units posted over at the UbD Educators wiki, but I decided maybe I should explain them a little bit more just in case you are interested in using them.
After I wrote my UbD unit for Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman, I was really excited to explore it with my students. At the time, I had either just finished or was in the midst of reading Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat. Friedman actually mentions Willy Loman in the book, and it occurred to me the play could appeal to my students if we looked at it through a modern lens — outsourcing, or what Friedman refers to as “the Death of the Salesmen.” I tied one of the themes of the play — that the world has passed Willy by and gradually made him obsolete as he failed to keep up — with a very real phenomenon in our society. Outsourcing is a huge concern in America, and over the last few decades in particular, we have also seen some jobs eliminated by technology.
My essential questions for the unit are as follows:
Through exploring these question, I hoped my students would come to the following understandings:
By the end of the unit, I hoped my students would be able to do the following:
First, we read the play, all the while having discussings about how Willy could be a modern character. The 1940’s, when the play was written, seem very far away from our students today, but I think this play is very modern in many ways, which I addressed in my essential questions.
After we read the play, we watched Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod’s video “Did You Know?” and discussed the ideas it presents:
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/pMcfrLYDm2U" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
We watched an episode of The Simpsons about outsourcing called “Kiss Kiss Bang Bangalore”:
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/k9_iQim8Mtw" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
Finally, we viewed a Discovery Times special featuring Thomas Friedman called “The Other Side of Outsourcing”:
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/8quDb3FIUuo" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
I have discussion questions for each of these videos, and it occurs to me I probably should have put them on my flash drive so I could upload them here. I will update this post in the future and attach the proper documents to the bottom of the post.
We also read excerpts of The World is Flat; specifically, we read “Death of the Salesmen” (256-259) from chapter four “The Great Sorting Out” and chapter six “The Untouchables” (278-307). Page number refer to the edition of the book I linked. Again, there are guided study questions.
Finally we synthesized all we had seen and read in a discussion that centered around the following questions:
Then I gave my students their job, which was to explore these questions in a handbook created for either high school graduates or college graduates (I assigned them randomly on the suggestion of our Learning Specialist) that would be a helpful guide for young people navigating our increasingly flattening world. I asked the students to consider the following in their handbooks:
I am not going to lie and say the assignment was a blazing success. I will say the reason it wasn’t was most likely due to the particular makeup of students I had and the fact that they were seniors who were checked out. I do believe it would be engaging for different students. It wasn’t a total failure either. I do think the students enjoyed examining these questions and thinking about them. Only about half of them really wanted to do the assignment, though. That half did a really nice job. Given the time of year and particular makeup of the class, I consider the unit as a whole a success, and I would definitely do it again. What I like about the assignment is that it enables students to examine literature through a modern lens, and I think they enjoyed it more than they otherwise would have.
Here is a link to the UbD unit over at the wiki, and here is a printer-friendly link.
Georgia has decided to invalidate the scores on the social studies portion of the CRCT that more than 70% of the state’s students failed. However, the scores of the 40% of 8th graders who failed the math portion will stand.
When 40% of an individual teacher’s students fail a standardized test, I imagine the teacher would be scrutinized, and rightly so. Whatever I think of standardized tests, 40% of a teacher’s students shouldn’t fail one, or something’s wrong with the teacher’s instruction. If 40% of a school’s students failed a standardized test, the school might be sanctioned depending on other factors — part of making Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) for NCLB means schools must maintain or even improve their pass rates for standardized tests. If schools fail to make AYP, a series of sanctions will follow, from losing funds to faculty “reorganization.” Again, if 40% of students at a school fail a test, there is something wrong with the school’s instruction.
But what if 40% of students in an entire state fail a test that they must pass in order to go to high school?
Unofficial results indicate that 40% of Georgia’s 8th grade students failed the math portion of the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test (CRCT), the main standardized test used in Georgia to meet NCLB requirements regarding testing. Last year, about 19% of students failed the math portion of the test. Students must pass this section of the CRCT in order to proceed to high school. Some are blaming the new math curriculum, while others are saying the test must be poorly constructed. I can’t say, not having seen it. I asked my daughter, who took it, and she says she believed she passed, as she thought students at her school who didn’t were instructed to see the counselor, and she was given no such instruction. She has been an A-student in math all year, so I shouldn’t have cause to worry, but the fact that 40% of students failed the test worries me.
The news regarding social studies was even worse. Less than 30% of 6th and 7th graders passed the social studies portion of the CRCT. Again, results like this for one teacher or one school can be explained, but for a whole state? Especially troubling to me are reports from students that they were asked questions about material they hadn’t learned. How could that happen on a “criterion-referenced” test?
I know the perception exists that Georgia schools are universally backward, but after having graduated from a Georgia school and watching my children in Georgia schools, I have to say that like everywhere else, Georgia has good schools and poor schools. A pertinent quote from the New Georgia Encyclopedia entry on Public Education:
The Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) is a college entrance exam often used to compare the performance of high school students among states and among school districts within a state. In 2003 Georgia students averaged 984 (combined verbal and math scores) on the SAT, compared with a national average score of 1026. When SAT scores are used to compare states, Georgia usually finishes near the bottom. The College Board, which administers the SAT, cautions against the use of SAT scores for this purpose, because the population of students taking the SAT in each state varies considerably. In some states, most students take a different test, the American College Testing [sic] (ACT). In those states, students who take the SAT generally have strong academic backgrounds and plan to apply to some of the nation’s most selective colleges and scholarship programs. For example, in 2002 there were nearly 54,000 Georgia students who took the SAT. In contrast, only 1,900 Iowa students took the SAT. (As a point of reference, Georgia had more than 72,000 high school graduates in 2002, while Iowa had nearly 34,000 high school graduates.)
My point in bringing this up is that I think it’s unfair to dismiss problems with the CRCT with a blanket generalization like “Georgia’s just got bad schools.”
So what happened, I wonder?