Beginning The Year

2 thoughts on “Beginning The Year”

1. chill1019

   July 4, 2010 at 7:41 am

   Ben , you are correct. The responsibility to create the atmosphere of play and giving the entire responsibility of the cute answer to the student is a key factor. In the middle of the year, when energy begins to sag and the kids are beaten down by work in other classes and I start to supply a cute answer because they are tired, disinterested, etc, the story becomes more mine than theirs. Somehow, at this cool advanced age of 14 or so, they have really lost the idea of play and school has become oh so serious. Perhaps direct instruction about playing and story ideas should be a part of the participation assessment. You said something about upping the ante on the participation part of their grade. Maybe we can all spend a moment in Los Alamitos discussing the beginning of the year. Everybody plays, whoo hoo!!

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2. Ben Slavic

   July 4, 2010 at 9:16 am

   “…perhaps direct instruction about playing and story ideas should be a part of the participation assessment…”.
   It’s a new idea but needs to be said. Yes, we can go over how we grade and figure out a way to bring this in to the assessment piece.
   I know one thing – when I was younger I would grade way too much. I know now that I don’t have to do that. People care a lot less than we think about how we grade. I think that the overgrading monkey has been on too many teachers’ backs for too long and is really a vestige from the last century. Well intentioned teachers think that they are accountable to come up with good instruments and then they spend over half their time doing that and it drains them from their real work of teaching. It’s a received idea – one that is very illusion based. People don’t care about the assessment process that we use – they could care less. Parents only want their little Fauntleroys to receive easy grades for little work. Young teachers make administrators into judges of the quality of their assessment. That is like allowing a high school thespian write a critique of the work of the work of a professional stage actor. They are not qualified to do so. If administrators see some grades in a column in the book, they are happy. Some teachers get into thinking that lots and lots of grades are indicative of good work. Not true again. The kids are not into the work, generally. I used to oppose that idea vigorously, and grade as if the kids were really into learning what I was teaching them. But that only leads to burnout because too many kids don’t really want to be there and have too many electronic and social and athletic interests to do much more than come to our class – I would say that that is true of at least 70% of them. Then why should I go nuts to create and maintain a complex grading thing? It’s not a grad course. Why bust our humps coming up with all this great assessment stuff? In fact, if we are smart, we will grade extremely simply, reflecting the simpletons who populate our classrooms. It’s smart to do that, and the participation grade and the suggestions aspect of that, however we work that out later this month, can make our lives much simpler. I owe you a meal at Denny’s, by the way.
   Just one more thing on this minor rant – when they start paying me what I’m worth while providing me with balanced amounts of kids in my room (25 or so), then I will consider going back to the way I used to grade, with strong assessment instruments that are really well designed. But, until that happens, I’m good to do it the way it has evolved for me, actually, this past year. Life is so much simpler that way.

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