It took me years to decide to weigh my students grades at 65% using jGR, with the other 35% a “Quizzes” category which included all the quick quizzes and dictations and free writes together.
This simple equation of 35% quizzes and 65% jGR worked for me because the heavy weight of jGR immediately, from the beginning of the year, caused students to sit up and pay attention to it as THE major factor in their grades. Anyone who objected was told immediately that my hands were tied, that I had to connect their child’s grade to the national standards and so that was what I was doing.
So much of what is described on this site as pedagogical tools are really classroom management tools, as classroom management continues to be a major focus here. And that’s a good thing, really, because in this work of teaching using comprehensible input, classroom management and teaching using comprehensible input are really one in the same thing, as explained clearly in some of the significant articles in the jGR category here on this site.
jGR at 65% has the added benefit of rousting out the helicopter parents who need to be confronted as early as possible in the year to get those confrontations and discussions out of the way so that I can teach. jGR either breaks or removes their little homework loving Fauntleroys from my classroom in August and September so I don’t have to deal with them after, say, mid-September. And I only have to do that training of kids and parents in my level 1 classes, which brings me peace of mind, because some of those little shits can drive a teacher nuts.
I know that 65% is a lot, but that’s the way I do it, because I believe that grading in American schools has everything to do with controlling kids and very little to do with actually honestly assessing what they can do, which doesn’t seem to be the point anymore. Grading kids in language classes in American schools has become an exercise in futility. We grade what they can do, their output, when they can’t do much at all, since we all know now that output has little to do with language acquisition in those first few hundred hours of instruction.
I would add that whenever I looked at my paycheck I couldn’t justify not body checking those little misbehaving kids with something like the jGR to get them to behave properly in my classroom. I don’t know. Maybe that was just me. I can’t equate low pay with emotion-shredding employment and so I finally got it, after way too many years of taking grading seriously and making some crazy stuff up in that grade book.
It’s probably just me. There seem to be lots of teachers out there who like the combination of low pay and emotion shredding record keeping and instruction these days, but I’m not one of them.