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Assessment Question
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23 thoughts on “Assessment Question”
Dave, my own position hasn’t changed since last year – if the core of what we do is input for the first two or three years, then I will grade on same. I won’t grade on writing and speaking at 60% like Scott bc my kids at levels 1 and 2 don’t output more than 10% in those years. Why?
I can’t in good conscience grade in terms of output when the kids aren’t ready to output with any skill at all. Likewise I would not ask two year old to train to dunk a basketball while she needed some time jumping around in the sandbox. The length of time of exposure to listening and reading input has been shown to be the main determinant of output skills later. I am not going to reverse that natural process for a gradebook.
The need to document learning is the culprit here. If we learned languages primarily by speaking and writing them first, with listening and reading skills being a natural outcome of those two skills over years, then I would reverse the process. But that isn’t the way it happens.
This, in my opinion, is another of many examples where ideas that may apply in other classes have been blanketed onto language acquisition. Either we do “what is frowned upon here” (grading in terms of input skills – which is what I think is best practices in assessment) and take a chance of rocking the boat*, or we do what we’re told (grading in terms of output skills).
I know which one of those I will do this year, personally. We all get to make our own decisions.
*however, I have figured out a secret about administrators. They don’t know, nor do they really care, what the difference is between output and input. I put my grades in the book, most are quick quizzes (input) from our daily CI sessions, and as long as there are enough of them, the admin never in the past tweleve years has bothered to check if my grades are based on output or input. The grades are there – that’s all that they care about. I will add one more thing about how your school may be misinterpreting the 3 modes in terms of foreign language acquisition in a comment below this one….
What do the three modes mean to us who align with Krashen and what do they mean to administrators? Let’s take each one and look at that:
1. the Interpretive Skill A – to me it means that a student can interpret what is being said or read. It means taking in the information and being able to make sense out of it in terms of prior knowledge. In France, films are not directed, they are interpreted. The director takes a script and makes sense out of it in terms of her own life experience. That’s what we ask our kids to do in a CI setting, and that is all we ask them to do.
2. the Interpretive Skill B – to an administrator this means being able to get a number of questions right on a test. Admins in general are going to workshops and hearing lectures about how students are being asked to do that too much, and how they need to learn to use computers and process at higher levels in more diverse ways and speak about what they think. That’s not what our kids do in a CI setting because they are not wired for that – they can’t process at higher levels and say what they think because they need thousands of hours in a language to be able to do that. They may be wired for that kind of work if they had good Socratic classes in middle school, but only in classes where their L1 is the common currency of communication. The admins then read about the interpretive skill and, since they don’t reflect on the fact that the kid can’t speak the language, they ding the deficient teacher, the one who is bravely trying to change over 100 years of ignorance in the teaching of languages.
1. the Interpersonal Skill A – to me, this means that when a student is in my class and is following my seven rules well, and I am doing what I am supposed to be doing (speaking slowly in the target language and creating content that they want to listen to bc it is interesting to them on a personal level), then we are engaging in language acquisition, which is a reciprocal and back and forth interactive process where the one who speaks the language (with babies it is mommy) speaks and the other listens OVER A VERY LONG PERIOD OF YEARS OF INPUT before the other speaks. That is the interspersonal skill in CI and it terms of what Krashen’s work has clearly demonstrated.
2. the Interpersonal Skill B – this is where the administrators, in their newly found love of the newest thing to come down the pike for them to sell to teachers, think that the interpersonal skill means that kids can somehow magically early on speak the language in response to prompts from the teachers. This stupid idea makes sense to them. They think that when they observe in a language classroom they should automaticall see the back and forth sharing of language between the student and the teacher, and then, since they pass judgement, they will say that the teacher is in fact doing their job and therefore worthy of the big bucks paid them along with the easy working conditions and the long vacations and the great retirement benefits. If the kid is not speaking, however, that badge would have to ding them in that respect, because 75% of their graduate credits in adminstation courses were in how to observe foreign language classrooms. So, when said administrator sees a kid speaking, and the 3 modes say right there in the interspersonal mode that the kid should be interpersonalizing with the teacher, and when they see that happening in the traditional teachers’ classes down the hallway, they ding the teacher who is waiting for the natural output process of speaking to kick in in later years. Of course, little does it occur to the administrator that the traditionally taught kids can respond to only six bonehead prompts in the target language bc the kids took all year to memorize them in the traditional (read memorizer’s) classroom.
1. the Presentational Skill A – this means that the kid has moved somewhere into speaking and writing, which according to Krashen (who?) take thousands of hours to begin to learn. I don’t focus on this skill in my high school classes bc even in four years of high school the kids can only get about 500 hours of the 10,000 hours needed before they can speak and write in any culturally authentic way in the TL. Nevertheless, the fact that the kid can’t really speak after those first 125 hours of CI in that hippy classroom earns them another ding by the badge. Seek not to know for whom the badge dings, it dings for you.
2. the Presentational Skill B – in the eyes of the administrator who knows next to nothing about how people actually acquire languages, this skill, the third of the three skills, beomes an opportunity to ding teachers whose kids can’t speak or write in the target language. The teacher feels stupid, which gives pleasure to too many administrators, the teacher perceives herself as smaller, the traditional teacher gloats bc her kids understood all six speaking prompts on the exit exam (“What is your name? My name is Sally.”) and the beat goes on.
Conclusions – the 3 modes of communication must be seen in terms of current research by language teachers who should educate administrators on exactly what they mean in foreign language acquisition. Therefore, any crowing by administrators, like the crowing you are hearing now, Dave, about tying the three modes to assessment in terms of what most unconscious administrators think (vs. what is best for students) is fallacious crowing and should be ignored by the professional who in fact actually understands how languages are acquired.
Dave, you’re correct that there can be quite a bit of difference in approach to grading among TPRS teachers, just as there is quite a bit of difference in approach to grading among grammar teachers.
This past year I combined grading the three modes of communication with Standards Based Assessment. The major change I will make this coming year is to reduce the percentage of the presentational mode and increase the percentage of the interpretive mode (and possibly interpersonal).
We had quite a bit of discussion about the interpersonal communication piece. Your are right that it can look like a “participation grade”, but it is based on a set of observable criteria (behaviors) that demonstrate communicative competency based on the ACTFL Performance Guidelines for Grades K-12. It is not a grade on “comportment”, to use the older term. Of course the two are related, but they are not identical. Let’s use a comparison with another discipline. A student shows up to PE class without gym clothes and so does not demonstrate any competence in the class, but he’s a nice guy and doesn’t give the teacher any trouble. Result? Academic grade: F; Citizenship: Satisfactory or even Outstanding; Work Habits: Needs Work. But isn’t not having gym clothes and not participating in the activity a Work Habits grade? Not having gym clothes may be Work Habits, but not doing the class activity is “Academic” (i.e. related to the course content and standards). By choosing not to participate, the student fails to show competency. The two are intimately related, but they are different things.
The foreign language classroom is similar, because it is a performance and competency-based content area. In the real world, no one cares how much you know about the language; the question is how well you communicate in the language, and that includes elements beyond language manipulation. Communicative competence in the interpersonal mode goes beyond merely being able to say a set of words that convey a particular meaning in the target language.
I hope this helps to clarify the difference between grading the interpersonal mode of communication and assessing participation/work habits.
My students are coming from a traditional class and will be returning to a traditional class after the one year that I have them (and the other sections at the same level will be taking a traditional class), so I feel that I can only move so far from the norm.
I feel like the interpretive skill is what the students are doing all the time in a CI or TPRS class. That feels easy to measure and document.
The presentational is obviously going to be the most limited at all levels but especially at the lower levels because they simply aren’t going to be able to produce as much. As much as I see the value in holding off from forcing production, I think that it is something that i cannot entirely avoid. Free-writes are a form of production that are used in CI classrooms aren’t they? Also, story-retells are an oral form of presentation. It is my intention to minimize the weight of such evaluation, and to evaluate them based on comprehension and complexity rather than grammatical accuracy. But at the end of the day, my colleagues will be asking me, if I am not teaching in the traditional grammar mode, what can my kids do (i.e. produce) at the end of the day that a kid in their class can’t.
For the interpretive, I would LOVE to see a rubric that is being used by anyone. I am at a high achieving private school where parents will ask to see documentation of how grades are calculated especially if they smell a nebulous participation grade which is just a way for a teacher who doesn’t like their little darling to drive down his grade. Can anyone share their specific way of measuring interpersonal communication in a very explicit manner?
I am also wondering how many of you out there have completely eschewed tests and rely solely on quick quizzes. I am required to give a midterm and final exam, but otherwise have some freedom and am wondering how others are doing it.
thanks again for the responses,
Dave
One of the items in the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines (K-12) deals with output. At the novice level, students should be able to re-produce items. That means “copy”. So, one legitimate “output” grade is the dictation. If I give a grade for a dictation, this is how it works:
1. Give the dictation “in the French manner”; i.e. students will hear the passage a total of four times without any English. The only think I say that is not part of the dictation is the word “OK” to indicate when I have finished a pass through the text. This part works this way:
a. Students mark every third line on a sheet of lined writing paper. They will write only on the lines that are marked.
b. Pencils/pens down; eyes on me. I read the passage through slowly without stopping, using inflection and stress to aid comprehension. (Reading 1)
“OK”
c. Students pick up pencils/pens. I read the passage in meaningful chunks and repeat each chunk. (Reading 2 and 3)
“OK”
d. Students look over text to make edits or changes. I read the passage through slowly without stopping.
“OK”
2. I put the text on the board (usually via projector and PowerPoint or Word document) and students reproduce (i.e. copy) it in a different color ink on the line just below where they wrote the dictation. This is in keeping with the ACTFL Guidelines for novice learners.
3. Students mark (circle, highlight) places in their original dictation that are different from what they copied down.
4. We discuss where there were problems and why. Most of the time they either didn’t hear something correctly, missed something because the were trying to fix something else, haven’t yet acquired the writing conventions or missed the punctuation (which I tell them not to worry about in the lower level; in the upper levels we discuss how German punctuation differs from English).
5. I grade the papers on how well they meet the standard (Novice learners can reproduce the language). This is based on
-format (did they follow the directions on layout)
-comprehensibility (is it readable / legible – if I can’t read it, I can’t grade it)
-accuracy of copying the written text
-accuracy in spotting differences between their original and the correct text (at the end of level 2 and above)
I do not grade the accuracy of the original dictation. That is simply another way of giving comprehensible input because the text is either from a story we have done in class or is a new version that uses the vocabulary they have already acquired. There is – or should be – nothing new in the dictation text (with the possible exception of a name or full cognate).
In the standards-based assessment model I use, students will get one of the following “grades”:
5 – Advanced – Exceeds Standard (not usually a possible score in a dictation)
4 – Proficient – Meets Standard*
3 – Basic – Close to meeting Standard / partially meets Standard*
2 – Below Basic – Fails to meet Standard*
1 – Far Below Basic – Thanks for showing up
0 – Nothing submitted
Others use a scale based on four, and some will disagree with my giving a 0. I won’t go into all the philosophical reasons for my choice. That’s just the way I have chosen to apply Standards-Based Assessment.
*The difference here between Proficient, Basic and Below Basic: Proficient is 80-100% correct copying (and identification of discrepancies); Basic is 50-79% correct copying (and identification of discrepancies); Below Basic is 20-49% correct copying (and identification of discrepancies). At less than 20% correct copying, I have either a Special Ed student who will have modifications or accommodations anyway or someone who didn’t try.
The reason there is usually no 5 for a dictation is the nature of the assessment. It has no higher-level applications, so students have no opportunity to show Advanced mastery. It doesn’t hurt their grade, however, because the score is out of 4, not 5. 4/4 is still 100% for the grade junkies.
My district has started moving toward SBA and has had Robert Marzano present a couple of times. I don’t agree with everything he says about SBA and “Power Grading”, but it represents another paradigm shift from point-based grading that I like. Ultimately, it is intended to reflect mastery according to a standard irrespective of how long it takes to achieve that mastery. Some teachers put time limits, and the school system puts limits based on quarters and semesters. If applied correctly, one of the things that SBA does is remove the idea of students competing against one another for a grade (No Bell Curve) and replace it with the concept of “competing” against a set standard. Philosophically and theologically that is, to me, much preferred. Scott Benedict has also done a lot with SBA, but he still breaks things down into the skills (reading, listening, speaking, writing, culture) rather than using the modes of communication.
Nice description of assessing output in terms of retells and freewrites. It’s just that some kids may lose confidence if their only crime is that they need more hours of CI to be able to output like someone else. Grading output at certain times of the year doesn’t convey any respect for the natural process of acquisition that differs in all people. There are all those stories out there about the geniuses who didn’t speak until they were six – those kinds of things. It just seems so odd to believe that output as it compares to others has any validity. It’s not consistent with how the brain works in each individual.
I also am required to give a mid term and final. But I am allowed to value it at a very low percentage if I want. So I do that. Such summative assessment is a product of a system that requires that students memorize, and that’s all it is.
Re an interpersonal rubric. Robert has gone to great pains to distinguish between a participation grade and a grade “based on a set of observable criteria (behaviors) that demonstrate communicative competency based on the ACTFL Performance Guidelines for Grades K-12”. If we can get a nice rubric that will do that, we will have made a success in responding to parents who sniff around. We can show them exactly where their little memorizer is deficient in those skills that are genuinely interpersonal, skills which, in spite of what they as parents might think, have a lot to do with assessment in a foreign language, if indeed it is something that we must do.
I’ll give a short answer as I’m running a bit short on time. I don’t give percentages to categories. I just label the assignment INTERPRETIVE READING or INTERPERSONAL SPEAKING. I don’t have to worry about the grade book percentages driving my instruction, and I don’t have to defend why a certain category is a certain percentage. We have other teachers who give percentages for categories, and no one has ever questioned why I don’t.
Here a story about why I don’t weight my categories: I had a student who was really close to an A at the end of the year. He really wanted to raise his grade, so we put in fake grades for the last 2 assessments to see what grade he needed to get the A. The problem was that nothing raised his grade, because the two last assessments were already his strongest grading categories. The weaker categories kept his grade low. I probably changed his grade anyway, but I know longer want weighted categories to affect a kid’s grade. Works for me (as Bryce says)…
dori v.
Thank you all for the thoughtful responses! What an amazingly reflective and compassionate community!
I misspoke earlier – but I agree with Ben – I would LOVE to see a rubric for interpersonal communication that I can use to satisfy my administration and parents that I am no simply giving the students a participation grade. Does anyone have one?
In response to dori – I completely understand what you are saying about not giving category weights to the grades. However, I wonder how a system would work in which I am giving interpersonal grades every day in class – how does that not overwhelm the other grades then? Or do I simply average the grades at the end of the week and only enter one weekly grade? more ideas…
I think I would do one of two things:
1. enter one weekly interpersonal grade. At least that’s what most of my colleagues do. Makes it a bit less work.
2. Use a multiplier for other grades that make them more important. Allows you to decide the importance of a particular assessment based on how it compares in length and complexity to other assessments.
Just a couple of ideas….
dori
Honestly I would suggest that Le Chevalier de L’Ouest (Robert) is the one to come up with such a rubric. He is in real touch with the standards in a way the rest of us are not. He knows the CA standards and the national standards. We go to the Big Dog a little too often here, but he is a force for organizing standards into action and I would prefer to just ask him, fully knowing that them all down there in Los Angeles are facing record numbers of students and so if he can’t get anything to us we understand. The man does a lot. We all do, actually. I just wrote an article this afternoon about that. We need to relax as we start the year, and I am feeling some serious stress coming from some of the members of this group. Let’s not let fear ravage and destroy the beautiful gardens of our lives this year.
I know Robert already has this rubric, because I copied it. But of course now I cannot find it. If I do, I will reference the post. If not, maybe someone else can locate it.
Just one other question / comment. I think Ben argued that the interpersonal skills, at least in the novice levels, potentially do “outweigh” the other grades (quick quizzes, dictations, etc) because these are the critical skills students need to develop for the long haul of real human communication. And, for “school purposes,” they need to develop these skills to “tone their comprehension muscles” so to speak, so that they can excel at the more quantifiable assessments like quizzes and tests. It’s all connected.
I remember that Robert’s rubric was worded clearly and it broke down these skills in a way that sounded “official” and “rigorous” and “school-ish” (yes, that is a word. I just made it up 😉 so that nobody could question the validity of the interpersonal skills and their assessment.
Now I will begin to comb my files for this document!
I’m afraid my rubric is on my school computer. However, here are some links to previous discussions.
https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/05/10/dear-everyman/
https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/11/12/interpersonal-modegrading/
https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/10/31/13812/
https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/10/30/brian-on-standards-based-grading/
I would still love to see some more rubrics. I tried to crib as much as I could off what I found in here, and this is what I came up with. I am aware that the vocabulary quizzes are useless, but I feel I need them as a sop to the other teachers (hence the 5% value). Also I wanted to lower the weight of the presentational mode but again felt that I needed to put some production in there. I feel guilty admitting as much, but I keep telling myself, small steps, small steps…
Please read and critique….
The majority of your grade in Spanish class will come fall under 3 basic categories:
Interpretive communication 45%
How well do you understand and written and spoken Spanish?
The majority of this grade will be based on short unannounced quizzes at the end of class.
Interpersonal communication 40%
This will be graded on a daily basis. How are you interacting with other students and the teacher? Are you actively negotiating meaning in Spanish? Are you signalling when you don’t understand?
The following scale will be used:
0 = not attentive, uses English unnecessarily
1 = fully attentive, sitting up and NO unnecessary use of English
2 = signals when he/she does not understand
3 = able to respond to Spanish with yes/no answers, either/or answers, 2-word English answers or Spanish
4 = able to respond in Spanish (does NOT need to be 100% correct!)
Presentational communication 10%
How well can you communicate in written and spoken Spanish? Once again, perfection is not the goal, but rather communication. For this grade you will complete Free Writes, retell and rewrite stories based on structures we have studied in class.
Free-writes will be graded only based on the number of words written. Re-tells will be graded based on comprehensibility and complexity, NOT grammatical accuracy.
Vocabulary quizzes 5%
The dates of those quizzes are Sept 20, Oct. 26, Nov. 27, Jan. 17, Feb. 19, March 18, April 17. You are responsible for studying for these quizzes outside of class using quizlet. All quizzes will be composed of Spanish words for which you need to give the English.
If you wish to retake these quizzes, you may retake them within 1 week of receiving the grade, outside of regular class time.
David,
I agree with Ben, it is very nicely done. You’ve broken it down in a simple way that includes all three modes. And it is for the most part, assessing input. I will tweek this one to meet my needs.
Thank you!
This is very strong, David. A lot of people could use it and we all thank you. We can adjust our percentages to suit ourelves. It’s a really good document that heavily resembles our summative yearly assessments in terms of percentages in Denver Public Schools. So simple. Being the laziest of all, I will stick with the daily quizzes at a huge percent, but those of us who need to present something a little more “teacher-like” to the public would do well to use this model or some variation of it.
Ben,
Mary Beth and I were having a discussion over the phone the day be4 yesterday, and we were wondering if you still give vocab quizzes. I told her I didn’t think you did that anymore but I was just guessing.
Do you?
Only if I need a grade. I make the entire system work for me, in that sense, since I refuse after all these decades of teaching to work for it. If I need a quick grade bc I didn’t give enough quizzes during the grading term, I can just quiz on random vocabulary off the Word Wall.
But that is not fair to the kids who have various levels of ability to retain the words that we only briefly went over at the beginning of each class and were not taught for acquisition like the three structures. So that is why I don’t do it anymore, in fact.
Grading is such bullshit. We spend a lot of time calculating detailed percentages on hundreds of kids in all kinds of different ways, sucking up hours and hours of time out of our weeks, bc we think lemmingly that that is what teachers do. and yet in no way is that process cautionary or helpful to the kids, who mostly could give a rip, except if the final grade is too low.
Why do we do that? Because that’s what teachers do? Because of all the extra cash we get when we grade in such an official and impressive and thorough way? To get parents to see that we mean business?
And then when the grades come out, even if they are accurate in terms of our rubrics because the kid really does not have participatory and human (i.e. based truly in the Three Modes) skills, we have to argue with parents on behalf of how we do the percentages in defense of our grading system. It’s insane. We are defending a system that no one believes in, but merely on the fact that it looks like it might make sense.
We are at a time in schools where teachers give grades that really don’t mean anything. They often go through a lengthy percentage-based process and then change it bc the kid, a B student in their mind, didn’t quite make the B so they bump it up.
All that time lost! That is why I just use the quizzes and a P for participation bc nobody, at least nobody in my current school (parents often work three jobs) cares except that the child not fail. How much work we do in calculating grades that is not necessary – a good deal than most of us would admit!
Even in the so called elite schools, the grading process a teacher uses is nothing more than the object of curiosity of university trained parents who eye it with one sole intent – to see how it affects their child’s grade.
If it does, meetings are held, teachers defend the system in the interests of academic integrity and alignment with standards, when their defense is not really true because there is no such thing as a truly accurate rubric.
Not to mention that teachers are always fudging grades and giving late-term tests that are really easy grades, tests that the kids orten talk the teacher into giving to save their grade and that the teacher gives willingly to avoid having to give “too many” F’s.
The goal of most teachers and hence the goal of their assessment instruments is to avoid unpleasant confrontations with parents. The parents are winning, if nobody hasn’t noticed.
A quick question to the people who are better informed or with more experience in standards-based grading.
On the scale below, how do you translate the numbers into an actual grade?
0 = not attentive, uses English unnecessarily
1 = fully attentive, sitting up and NO unnecessary use of English
2 = signals when he/she does not understand
3 = able to respond to Spanish with yes/no answers, either/or answers, 2-word English answers or Spanish
4 = able to respond in Spanish (does NOT need to be 100% correct!)
I have to input numbers into the grading software that the school uses. So would it be
0 – 60%
1 – 70%
2- 80%
3 – 90%
4 – 100%
That seems to me to be the easiest way to do it, but I’m wondering if that is fair, or what problems might arise.
David, upon a second read of that rubric, these numbers and descriptors would not work for me. Look at what a 2 is -they get a 2 for signalling when they don’t understand. Think of the arguments when the kid says that they understand it (lying) and so don’t signal. Look at the 4 – level one kids can’t do that skill, shouldn’t be able to. I give A’s to kids who never speak bc they are so locked on to class. Look at what a 1 is – that could be a 4. I like Robert Harrell’s five point scale. It works. Sorry I didn’t notice this before.
Ben,
Thanks for the feedback. I would love to see what Robert’s 5 point scale looks like.
My thoughts are – To meet the standard (3) they don’t need to speak Spanish. The 4 is exceeding the standard. I think that requiring that they respond to the choral responses or to yes/no questions at this level (really their 2nd year) is reasonable as the standard.
In terms of the kids who don’t signal (2 level) – my thought is that it would rapidly become obvious who our slower processors are. If they aren’t responding at all, not even to signal confusion, I could simply ask them “What did I just say” – and if they don’t know, review the expectations of their 50% in class which requires them to let me know if they are lost. I have no desire to punish the quiet or slower students, however, it seems to me that if we are going to have an interpersonal standard, by definition it is would have to include both the give (responses of some sort) and taking (active listening skills).
My opinion on the interpersonal standard is that the kids will fool us into looking non-participatory and give us nothing that we can see but in fact are getting everything. To hold them to giving a response, therefore, may not always be fair to them. It gets tricky. I think that any rubric should be graded in the way a taxonomy measures levels of how much they show of a specific (the same) skill. I hope that makes sense.
Suggestions on what I should do and how I should do it with the following grade setup that I am required to have:
Spanish 1
Homework 10%
Participation 25%
Assessments 65%
Spanish 2
Homework 10%
Participation 20%
Assessments 70%
I know I’ve posted this before somewhere but I’ve lost it. I was also in the workshop by Scott and recently was talking with my supervisor about how to manipulate the above percentages into the categories Dave mentioned that Scott shared with us….but now the above posts have changed my thinking. What the heck do I do and how do I do it?
Jenifer,
I would simply use the interpersonal rubric as the “participation” grade. Optimally, that would count for more, but if you are stuck with 20 and 25% you can at least work with that.
The assessments at 65 and 70% – those are your end of class quizzes, plus any tests (if you do them), or dictations or free-writes, or retells, or whatever else you use. If you want to divide that “assessment” grade further you could break it up into the 4 skills (writing, reading, speaking, listening) or you could break it up into the 2 remaining modes of communication (interpretive and presentational). Either way, I would give a lot more weight to the receptive skills rather than any output. I would do: 80% interpretive, 20% presentational, or something along those lines, depending on how much you want the kids to produce.
The homework grade has me a bit stumped – I suppose that I would use that for having students retell (rewrite) stories, or drawing pictures in a comic style (little squares) to illustrate the story. I am trying not to give much if any homework this year, and not grade any of it, so I’m not the expert here.