I am moving this from comment status to a blog post:
I weigh the quizzes at 75%. They are on scantron. They are yes/no. They can be from any class except Fridays, which I reserve for songs and poetry, areas way to sacred to connect to a grade. Thus, they can be from the PQA we do on Mondays, the stories we do on Tuesdays, or the kick butt reading classes we do on Wednesdays and Thursdays. I choose on any given day if that is the day it feels like a quiz will even fit. I do maybe one quiz a week, occasionally two. It keeps the kids guessing. No predictable quiz day means that ditching class is potentially a big powerful (because there are so few quizzes) fat zero in the book that can bring any grade to an F in an instant. Not to mention that if I test any more than that I then lose valuable minutes that could have otherwise been used for CI in the form of listening or reading, which reminds us of Blaine’s famous statement, or Krashen’s, not sure, that you “can’t make a pig any fatter by weighing it more often”.
Those who look at my gradebook to see if I am a good teacher believe that I am a good teacher when they see the term “Story Content Test 1? or “Reading Test 1? with the nice, official looking CT1 or RT1 abbreviation next to it. They haven’t the faintest idea that the quiz took only three minutes to give. It looks real. It’s not. I don’t need even need to test. I wish I had a helmet with a camera on it to record what I see in their eyes in class. That is where I can tell you with extreme accuracy how much they are getting. I am Susan Gross trained and one of her biggest things is Teaching to the Eyes and I am good at it. That is how I really know what they know.
Every once in a while, if I don’t see their eyes focused on me and my CI, I just say in English, while looking at an offender, “You’re being graded right now and what I see now is what really counts. So sit up and square up your shoulders with me and pay attention.” There is a slight rustling noise as the offender gets back into focus (I wait kids out on that). I tell them that no matter what the gradebook says, I can and will change their grade up or down and I frequently do. I just change the grade to reflect what I see in class. One kid I have is a super super fast processor and a kind hearted kid. He doesn’t score perfectly on quizzes to reflect the masterful listening he does in class. By giving him a B and not an A because of what the gradebook says sends a strong message to him: in my classroom tests are more important then human interaction. Nope on that.
Sometimes I forget to ask the Quiz Writer to write a quiz (which is so easy for some kids, they could write 30 questions if 30 minutes if they wanted to because everything is so SLOW and easy to understand and interesting). In that case of no quiz, and this can only be done in a reading class, I may have them take out a sheet of paper and tell them to look at the projected text we just spent all period talking about as per:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/10/21/additions-to-option-a/
and ask them to translate on paragraph or a few lines. I would take that stack of papers to my office and sit there and, in five to ten minutes, have slapped grades up to 10 on each, almost as fast as it takes me to move the papers from the “not graded” to the “graded” pile, as per:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/09/26/12752/
The other part is a bogus 25% “participation” grade (the term has no validity but I use it anyway). It allows me that grade manipulation capacity to move the kid into line with the grade that I know they should have based on attendance and what I see in class – sitting up and squaring up with me. But that will probably go to 50% as it goes from being bogus to real as per the information we are getting here from the Los Angeles Initiative.
Frankly, Brian, I am so glad that you decided on ultra simplicity. Indeed, a good portion of teacher burnout, of their unhappiness with teaching, is straw man stuff. They think that the Emperor has clothes. They believe all that shit from administrators. Why do people become administrators? In my view, and I say this with compassion because it is true of all of us, they have control issues. And we believe them when they try to intimidate us with the implied falsity that we must have a good looking gradebook. We work ourselves into burnoutb over something as unimportant as a grade book. I shared a moment with a colleague last week who showed me her gradebook. In the last two and a half weeks she has about 20 grades in there. I kid you not. That is sick. She even admitted it and says that five years ago it was worse. Nobody cares, Brian, nobody cares. Except maybe your family and your own need of time to heal from work. Nobody cares. It’s all a big joke.