GRRRRRading

So, I've tried to stay away from toxic subjects, but grading is one that is a hotly contested topic currently in my district. So...here it goes.

A few weeks ago, our district sent around a flyer about a grading study group that they were putting together to investigate new ways to grade. One of these new ways involves a no zero policy allowing for the lowest grade assignable to be a 50. In the words of Hamlet, "Angels and ministers of grace defend us!"

I get perhaps shielding maybe some students occasionally from getting a zero, but to never assign them? I am supposed to give a student who turned in nothing for the quarter a 50? Something seems wrong here.

Now, I am aware of all the blah-blah arguments about grades, but here is a brief list of reasons why this policy is a bad idea:

1. Grades are a measure of student progress. A student who does not understand 50 percent of the material should not be misled into believing that he or she does.

2. NOT because it will inflate grades. There is a great article which I cannot find at the moment (of course) called "The Drama without a Villain." The whole article is dedicated to the myth of grade inflation. It begins with the Committee of Ten, those guys who created Carnegie Units, complaining about, you got it, too many "A"s being awarded. Not going to go deeply into it here, maybe in another post in February, but according to this fine article (which I swear I will find and then post the bibliographic information for at a later date) grade inflation is about as real as Nessie and the Creature from the Blue Lagoon.

3. I've seen too many students in AP English courses who can't write. I am not being over-the-top here. Let me give you an example: "incase" as a word throughout an entire essay. Once would have been a typo; twice, tragic. No less than twelve times did this student, who is actually on of the best I have, write this as one word.

4. I don't spend my precious time tackling mound after mound of papers so that I can give a student who completely ignored the assignment a 50. If I ask for a paper on Jude the Obscure and I get an essay on the merits of certain waterfowl, I should be able to give that student an appropriate grade.

5. Where is the justice in assigning a plagiarized paper a 50?

These reasons and many more have me stewing about this attempt to rewrite policy.

An aside on the policy piece. In Virginia, the COMMONWEALTH where I teach (all caps on purpose), there are only local Boards of Supervisors who control the purse strings. School boards are dependent upon these local boards for their budgets, etc. School boards are not allowed to generate a private revenue stream. Thus, much like the federal government, our Boards of Supervisors have a little bit of control over what is done in the schools. Just thought I would mention that for those from most of the other states who have independent school boards.

So, this attempt to rewrite policy is being driven by assistant superintendents of curriculum, etc. who wish to get a gold star on their resumes, School Board members who have children in the system, and Board of Supervisors members who have school children in the system. There is a trifecta if I ever saw one.

So, I began thinking about what the implication would be for students in the English classroom. Potentially, students could pass English classes while avoiding an entire section of the course. Don't like the essay writing? Skip it and do everything else. Don't like to read? Skip it and write the essays. With the lowest grade being a 50 and the highest F being a 59, there are only 10 percentage points that need to be attained before students get a passing 60.

What do you think?

Can this grading system be used for anything other than turning out a bunch of students who can't read, write, or think?

Has this system been implemented in your district? If so, how is it working out?

Is it a good idea to destroy our own competitiveness as the forces of globalization once again demand that we compete for ideas, resources, and power?

Is it destructive to students to lie to them about where they really fall?

Teaching Civil Argument in today’s America

I’ve just finished grading my students’ argument essays. In third person voice, students are asked to argue a point of view using three quotations from an assigned reading. I’ve done some variation of this assignment each of my fifteen years of teaching writing. Across that time, I’ve seen students’ arguments grow more…well, more bullying.

I teach my students that the goal of an academic argument is to persuade people who don’t already agree. I encourage them to strike a tone that acknowledges the opposing point of view while refuting it with examples and evidence. Lately, as recent as the last few years, a growing percentage of students (not all of them), try to vilify the other side in their arguments. Now, hyperbole is not new to novice writers, but the tenor seems uglier to me. Gross generalizations characterize their enemies: “Parents today are fat and lazy.” “Everybody’s a pervert on the Internet.” “Stupid people deserve what credit card companies do to them.” Yikes!

As I spent this past week writing comments that asked how those remarks would persuade rather than alienate an audience who recognized themselves in the statements, I thought about the current media climate in which my students are growing up. Polarity and anger seem to be the modern media’s cash cow. Regardless of party affiliation, blogs and cable news channels teem with bile and anger. Gone are the David Brinkleys of my own coming of age. Phil Donahue, once considered such a hot head because he leaned forward in his chair and even stood up and ran around his audience, strikes me now as a gentle journalistic hippie. When I think of the people they see as models of “academic argument,” I realize my students might just be imitating the nation’s model for argumentative discourse.

I try not to be outdated as a teacher. I don’t teach MLA the way it was in my day (end notes, anyone?), and I don’t require that all their sources in a research essay come from hard copy sources. One of my responsibilities is to prepare my students for the current marketplace they face—and yet? I don’t know if I can change here. I might just retreat to my ivory tower and teach students the civil argumentative discourse I believe is the root of understanding and change in the world and trust that our current ravings will pass.

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Thoughts as I Crawl out from the Grading Pile

Another semester's research essays have been drafted, revised, and graded. I haven’t run a marathon, but I imagine the months of preparing and then the grueling mile after mile with “just five more” miles than seems possible might be a physical facsimile to the mental task of grading multiple class sections of six to eight page research essays. It feels good to be on this side of the finish line!

I’ve shared my trusty research essay grading tool before, but my students remarked that they found my comments especially helpful this semester, so I’ve been thinking about the evolution of my written feedback to students on how to improve their writing. In college, we studied Peter Elbow, Donald Murray, and Nancy Atwell, and fifteen years later, I don’t remember which concepts and influences came from which person. I’ll credit all three of them with forming my dedication to revision. My own schooling did not model revision or teach the writing process. Some of us intuited it and used it either internally or privately; other students struggled.

At this point, my written feedback to students couches itself in the language of revision. While my grading charts and line markings might itemize things that are missing, the language of my end of essay feedback focuses on the next version of the essay (or the way the next assignment should be written). Instead of writing, as I did years ago, “You’ve lost points for writing with second person,” I write, “In your next draft, please avoid second person; use more specific nouns to strengthen your use of third person.” “Frequent comma splices distract from your content” has become “Better editing of your use of the comma will prevent the comma splice from diminishing the power of your prose.” I stopped writing things like, “Pervasive errors with your MLA make your use of research distracting instead of persuasive” and started writing things like “Once you fix your MLA, your integration of research will better support your argument.” I’m not saying this is an earth shattering technique; I think it’s a focus, a perspective, to which students respond, especially touchy, self-esteem-full millennial students. I use the feedback to describe the changes needed to create the next, better, more successful product. For discouraged students, it helps them see the next step. For students lacking editorial judgment, it helps them identify the missing elements that can still be added. It keeps the focus on moving forward.

In recent years (probably since becoming a parent), I’ve noticed my feedback getting peppered with a more parental tone. I write things like, “I’m confident you can create a stronger vehicle for your ideas,” which seems to me an English teacher variation of “Your father and I know you can do better.” I use more phrases like “I enjoyed…, but I wish…” “In the future, I look forward to seeing…” I don’t know when exactly I made this shift, but it seems to be helping. Mostly, I teach discouraged or disinterested writers. I think by using my feedback to imagine a better product for their writing, I am establishing the idea for the first time in their minds. (Gosh, that’s a little depressing, but I’m thinking it may be true…) I took driving lessons from the gym teacher at my high school, and he told me, “The car goes where you’re looking.” I’ve always thought of that as a powerful metaphor for most anything in life. The essay goes where the writer imagines it. Let’s face it--many developing writers don’t give their essays’ horizons much imagining. By sketching a more powerful written product out in my feedback, I’ve nudged more writers towards improvement than when I itemized the troubles within the existing product. Like the influences of wind or surf upon a rock, my revision minded feedback might make small, incremental changes in the way students see their own writing over time. However, at this point in the semester, I’m just glad I can see any change!

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Parsing out the Teaching from the Labor

At a recent conference, I ate lunch opposite an entrepreneur who invented a company that helps colleges grade student essays via the Internet. For example, as the classroom instructor, I could give feedback to students’ first drafts. They could do a peer review on the next revision, and then send that version to the online tool to be graded by live, qualified individuals who respond in fewer than 24 hours. Then I would grade their final draft. Besides lightening my grading load, this process also gives students up to three reading audiences for one essay. After some lively debate, I left the table with one point this entrepreneur made resonating in my head: “Teachers need to identify what they do better than technology. Then they need to cultivate that and let technology do the rest.”

He argued that historically across industries, technology has increased productivity and reduced costs. He pointed out that education mostly uses technology as an alternate delivery method. Again, he told us, “Teachers need to identify what they do better than technology. Then they need to cultivate that and let technology do the rest.”

My colleague and I discussed it on the car ride home. I talked to my husband…Bored my friends with it…Dreamt about it…A world in which a portion of the grading process could be subcontracted out...A world in which I am the Master Teacher, and my time is a valued commodity not to be spent grading fill-in-the-blank vocabulary tests. On some levels, it’s intoxicating. On other levels, I’m intimidated.

I already believe in mastery quizzing; if the answers on an assessment should be the same for every student, I already have it on my class web enhancement. It takes an investment of time up front to load a multiple choice quiz into software, but watching students practice repeatedly with the instant feedback has convinced me my time is well spent on the effort. What do I do better than technology in this instance? Well, sometimes, I like to write the content myself. Not all the time…some grammar practice is universal, and I use other sources liberally. Sometimes, however, I want to customize content to my students or our particular needs at that time, and I use my expertise to do so.

I’m more uncomfortable with the idea of using standardized technology tools to help with grading student essays. I argued that I “pay witness” to students’ incremental growth by responding to each stage of their drafts myself. Is that true or merely narcissistic? Do I believe it matters that I read everything myself just because that’s what I’ve told myself to get through pile after pile? Would it be so terrible to let students have a mix of authorities read their essays through the writing process even if some of those authorities are people neither I nor my students ever meet?

If technology truly grows into assessment over the next few years, what do I do “better than technology?” The question has buzzed around my head because I identify much of my teaching with my assessment of the writing process. To see a movement (not that anyone’s offering to buy my department this tool) on the horizon that takes over parts of the assessment process intimidates me a little. If someone else lightened the assessment load, what would I put in its place as a writing instructor? I can be heard clucking my tongue, saying things like, “There’s so much I never get to,” but am I ready to get to it? Would it be an opportunity or the end of personalized feedback and an intimate learning process?

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Maybe If I Beg for Mercy

"Please stop writing in second person voice, " I sobbed. "I beg of you. Please."

Okay, maybe that's too dramatic, but I'm currently waist deep in essay grading, and that's what I feel like saying to my students. Why is writing in second person voice such a pervasive habit for students? It's like writing kudzu...If I see a little in the introduction and start pulling, I'll find the instances of "you" have branched out and grabbed hold of the entire essay.

I give a mini-lesson on pronouns. I share with them the school of thought that second person voice is too bossy for academic writing, that it can irritate a reader like a wagging finger that begs to be slapped away. I openly confess that I will be using second person when I direct them on how to improve their writing, trying to clarify that giving directions is its rightful place in language.

Students nod. Students earn 100% on the quiz. Students continue to write with second person in their argumentative essays. "You really need to read this website." "You shouldn't let your pets on people's lawns." And my personal favorite, a sentence that uses third person voice merely as an address to set up the second person voice: "Parents, you shouldn't let your kids watch too much television." After grading a dozen or so directives, my head buzzes with regressed adolescent thoughts of rebellion.

I realize writing in second person voice might not be the writing error of greatest concern. I, too, am grateful for paragraphs without fragments. As I sit here in the trenches this weekend, however, the essays that reproach me for habits I may or may not have make me grit my teeth. I'll circle the instances of "you" and ask students to rewrite. They will do so, almost always successfully once it has been pointed out. How to prevent the problem in the first place, however, remains a teaching challenge for me.

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Prophylactic Grading

Over the years, I’ve learned to use grading to prevent bad writing instead of using it to record the grievances dealt by bad writing. Ever since I started teaching, I have believed in writing as a process, especially with a big project such as a research essay. It took me years, however, to realize that I should stretch my grading energy and investment across that process, too. In the early years, I gave students a folder with a checklist, and I gave them points for finishing each step, but I thought my time for detailed grading came at the end, on the final essay product. I would pour energy into marking those final essays with margin notes and thought-provoking questions. I then spent too much time feeling frustrated and hurt that my students didn’t even seem to read those markings, let alone reflect upon them.

By choice, I teach writing to people who have yet to identify themselves as writers. Many of my students write because writing has been assigned. Therefore, my grading comments best serve students when they come during their process. Mentor teachers taught me this technique, and I think after spending the better part of two decades grading, I may be polishing a system that is working. I think I finally get that if students cannot use my feedback to improve their grade, they don’t spend much time processing it. It may sound silly, but it helps my own enthusiasm to know my grading feedback can be “part of the solution” instead of just a record of the problem.

Here’s a run-down of the assignments throughout the research essay process that I grade:

· a potential topic discussion thread, complete with a potential source

o At this point, students reply to each other’s ideas. I make comments if potential topics seem like a dead end, but mostly I just keep track that this assignment has been completed.

· a finalized proposed topic, complete with an initial source

o I provide individualized responses to each student, approving each topic.

· an Annotated Bibliography

o I grade this assignment closely; I mark MLA mistakes and provide directed guidance for correcting errors. I evaluate the quality of the sources, ensure that some balance is represented, and encourage students to look for additional information where necessary.

· an essay proposal, stating why people should care about the issue and what problems the student anticipates with the essay

o I read these and respond to students about the problems they identify. Mostly, this assignment asks questions that get students thinking more deeply about the essay they plan to write.

· a thesis statement

o I grade this assignment closely; many students write this thesis statement several times. I want to be sure each student has a strong argument in third person voice; sometimes students are slipping into writing a report instead of a persuasive argument, and I’m usually able to determine that problem (and fix it!) at this stage. Once students have actually written an entire report, they are much more reluctant to revise it!

· a loose outline, which identifies a specific audience, the opposing point of view, and main points

o I read these and respond to problems. Mostly, I make the grading equivalent of reassuring noises: “Looks interesting!” “I can tell you’re really starting to think here!” Yadda Yadda. This assignment falls in the category of activities that help students think.

· a rough draft and the peer review of another person’s draft

o I don’t line edit rough drafts. I scan each of them, looking for flagrant problems: the wrong voice, tragic MLA format, too few sources, lack of quotation integration…If I see a big problem, I write notes back to the student. Most often, I look at all the drafts and create a “Checklist before the Final Draft” document, identifying all the various problems I saw throughout the drafts, which I distribute and go over with students. Students provide each other feedback about arguments at this stage. (With various degrees of success…I’m still working on the perfect peer review process…)

· the final essay

o I use a grading chart at this point, including a personal note to students about their argument. Do I mark lines throughout the essay? Yes, sometimes. I’ll write a question in the body of the essay or circle problematic prose. But I really try to restrain myself and save my energy for writing a more detailed personal note at the end…

Does all this effort improve students’ products as well as their process? I think so. To be completely honest, I think how well a student writes a research essay depends most upon how much research writing experience he or she has before the assignment, an element I don’t get to control. Mostly, I think investing more of my grading energy on the process (rather than saving it all for that final essay) helps students replicate the process in other classes, which is one of my goals—a teach a man to fish kind of thing. It also puts my energy more in parallel with students’ energy. They care about the essay before the end. Putting more detailed feedback into the process allows students to immediately apply my feedback, too. The entire effort has more momentum, more meaning. Here comes the stack now, so I’ll see how well it worked this time…

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Seeing My "Hole" in Holistic

So I’ve learned tons of stuff after organizing a cross-institutional grading session between our county high schools, our local community college, and our nearest four year university; we’re still sorting through the data, and I think most of what I’ve learned informs what we should have done constructing the exercise. I’ll report when we’ve figured enough out to share sensible insights.

In the meantime, the actual experience of grading against the SAT rubric with teachers from different “walks of teaching life” left me rather breathless. I sat with a community college ESOL teacher, a four year state college adjunct, and within ear shot of the chair of the community college English department. Suffice it to say, the norming process exists because teachers vary greatly.

Norming effectively takes a long time, and I know it can get done properly. Essentially, the norming process requires each teacher to set aside his or her personal biases to share a standard of quality as measured by the rubric. In my English department, we norm for the state writing test (a very basic, minimal writing assessment), but we don’t norm with each other for on-level student writing. We have a rubric for on-level student writing, written who knows when by whomever, and we all use it variably.

Now since no test needed assessment, actual norming between teachers wasn’t even a goal. Instead, we used that paradigm to sit down together with the SAT rubric and look at essays written by community college students, written on the first day of Comp English 101, to study how differently we grade. As the choir I preach to knows, the idea of rubric grading is to grade “holistically,” with no single attribute truly outweighing any of the others. Yeah. Right. Sure. Of course. It can be a painful process.

Here’s my overall conclusion: Grading holistically isn’t easy because our teaching experiences create biases in the ways we grade. The more a teacher works with students struggling with grammar, the less likely that teacher is to deem grammar errors as “interfering with an essay’s meaning.” If a teacher spends her day mostly with AP or advanced English majors, she will see fewer fragments and less subject/verb agreement errors. It’s the nature of the tracking beast. For teachers who work with writers who do make those errors frequently, it’s like being accustomed to the dialect of a beloved multi-lingual friend—after a while, it’s hard to even notice the accent because the ear adjusts.

According to insights gleaned during our grading experiment, some teachers who mostly teach higher level writers also gave more credit for “figurative language,” especially if the essay used strong standard English, which I more often considered “tangential bologna.” Now don’t get me wrong, I enjoy my share of poetic language in an argument, but I don’t prefer a list of similes to a list of supportive examples clearly illustrating a sub-point of a thesis. For me, similes work best when used as part of the argument rather than instead of the argument; whereas, some of my fellow teachers who work with more filtered students, while agreeing that the similes in the writing sample took the place of the argument, felt that the use of visual imagery deserved recognition.

My own bias for a strong argument creates my struggle with remembering that a rubric list of attributes is not hierarchical; most rubrics start with a description of the argument and end with a description of the mechanics. I tend to think the argument counts more than the use of the comma anyway, so that list order reinforces this bias in my brain. I can shake that when I norm for state test grading, but in general in my classes, I recognize that I weigh the argument more than the punctuation. Some of my peers confessed their total abhorrence for shifting voice—half a discussion about “everyone” and half a discussion about “I.” I sheepishly hoped I even notice such a voice shift since the absence of pervasive second person makes me so giddy with joy, I suspect I fail to see beyond it.

What does any of this mean? Honestly, we’re still sorting that out. We all sat down together to see how everyone grades a paper, and we’ve statistically verified our different points of view. The next step requires data analysis and discussion; since almost everyone has end of semester grading coming in, I’m not exactly sure when we’ll draw our conclusions. Personally, the experience makes me glad I don’t have to grade holistically all the time. It makes sense for big exams, like SAT and AP, but without a norming session, I struggle to shake how accustomed I am to seeing “definitely” spelled “defiantly” (Yes, it used to bother me, but after thousands of exposures, I’m like a grammar cockroach…). Without a norming session, I retain my preference for a strong, logical response to the prompt peppered with comma splices as opposed to a punctuation-perfect song and dance. I’d argue we all put a “hole” somewhere in holistic, and I’d like to believe that identifying my bias and reflecting upon it will improve the way I grade.

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

"Know When to Walk Away--Know When to Run"

Am I referring to a difficult exchange with a student? A department disagreement? No, as almost always, I’m referring to that charming stack of essays to be graded that almost every English teacher has fermenting in a tote bag on the seat of the car, near the front door, or by her or his desk. I try to grade essays within seven to ten days of receipt because I find students’ investment dwindles if I take too long to get the essays back. That makes me feel like I wasted energy, and I can’t stand that feeling. However, October is a busy time for me.

Besides the fact that I mother a four year old and the Halloween season is in full swing (he’ll be a penguin, by the way), the conference I coordinate for regional English teachers takes place next week, too. It’s an exciting time for both those reasons. Through some really poor planning on my part, all of my classes turned in essays to me about now. (I think I thought back in August, “The conference isn’t for another week; I’ll grade everything before the big day!” Did I forget that I decided to hand fold the programs? Groan.) I’m having difficulty quieting my mind sufficiently to pay these essays the attention the students who wrote them deserve.

Students like to get their work back quickly. Telling students I don’t have their work because my life kicked up a notch gets about as much sympathy as when a parent tells a beloved child she has a headache. “And this means what to me?” asks the child, eyebrows arched. So I don’t tell my students I’ve prioritized other things. Instead, I explain that, for various reasons, I’m having trouble grading with patience and interest. “I don’t think that’s fair to all of you,” I explain, “ so I’m going to take some extra time to be sure each essay gets the attention it deserves. I don’t want to take my stress out on somebody’s essay!”

I don’t think they’d grant me a month, but they do give me the breathing room I need right now. When students nag me about papers I’m already feeling guilty about, I tend to get snippy, which serves no one. I’ve found that openly pushing back from the table, confessing I’m walking away for a week or so, garners respect and space.

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Mundane Musings

So this week I collect essays based on my snazzy new assignment. I asked students to identify and define the audience for one of four websites, in an effort to combine their love of the Internet with my desire to anchor their concept of audience in writing. The thesis process has been positive overall although I did realize that my directions needed modification and clarification. Once I tweaked those directions, the thesis statements improved. (Oh, those guinea pig first period students, eh?)

I’m nervous about grading essays based upon a new assignment. Usually, I dive right into the pile and start my stack countdown immediately. However, with a new assignment, I need to get the lay of the land a bit. Right now, a good version of this essay exists only in my imagination. I haven’t seen yet what students will produce in response to this assignment. Lots of weary experience has taught me that my imagination can be inflated. In a way, getting students’ products on this new idea gives the assignment itself a grade. I get to see if the assignment fosters the skills and understanding I intended for it or if it just creates a brand new level of confusion and ambivalence.

Waiting for these essays feels like a professional version of getting first class mail. (Okay, I can now never deny what a total and utter dork I am. I love first class mail even though I am devoted to technology. I. Love. Snail. Mail.) Teaching writing can be very isolating. We assign essays, we explain them, we get students pre-writing; it can be difficult to summarize for a fellow teacher how we guided a class of students to write a certain essay. Crafting an essay assignment excites me, but it is like being the first person in a couple to ask the other person out. I've put myself out there with this assignment. Did it land? Did it help? Did it further my pedagogical goals? Did it ignite the "aha moment" in my students when they'll start to feel like writers? (Gosh, I don't take all this too seriously, do I?) When the stack comes in at the end of this week, it will be like the other person's answer to my risky proposition: "Would you like to learn how to love to write with me?"

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

A Parent's Big Questions about Education, Part 2

This week concludes my response to a concerned parent, Nanci, who emailed me some questions she has about her children’s schools. Nanci wrote that she wanted to hear what teachers thought of her concerns, so please don’t be shy about contributing thoughts and comments.

In a situation where an administration receives feedback from numerous parents that a new teacher is proceeding with poor teaching, frequently changing deadlines and rubrics, and harmful grading policies, WHY does the administration not assign a supervisor to micro-manage and closely remediate the teacher for the balance of the year?

The school may have assigned a mentor, but in my experience, no one is available to take on another teacher’s work load to the level of micromanagement and remediation. (If a teacher gets fired, that would free up some money to pay someone else to do the job.) Let’s say another English teacher got assigned to me. That English teacher already has a full class load of her own. How is she supposed to really improve my teaching while handling her own course load? Schools don’t usually have teachers with little to do. If that teacher tries to help me, she’s going to do it in half hour bursts after school or during lunch. The problems you describe, like changing deadlines and grading policies, have to do with organization and experience. It is very difficult to really help someone with a month long unit plan while teaching and grading five class sections of your own. Schools have not made the financial commitment to pay for that kind of support for new teachers. I currently teach and live in Central Florida, where the arts keep getting cut and class sizes continue to increase. These administrators’ budget constraints do not allow for a teaching position without a class load to support new teachers. The system in place is old, and it does not respond adequately to the time it takes teachers to learn to meet the needs of 21^st century teaching.

Why do schools NOT have a standardized grading policy? Wouldn't it make sense to universally say that tests are 40% of a high-schooler's grade and that 40% must contain at least 5 tests?

As an English teacher, I give very few tests, so I would rail against such a policy myself. I think school systems are often too big to make such sweeping policies. In my experience, the county system restricted how much of a percentage homework could be and wrote a specific curriculum for each course. In English, the curriculum determined how many major essays needed to be completed each semester. In our department, we standardized how much of the grade each of those essays should be. After the essay grades and the homework grades had been determined, the rest of the average was left to the teachers’ discretion. So for example, a new teacher would be told, “This semester you need to do Essay A and Essay B, and they each should be 20% of the grade. Homework can’t be more than 10%.” The other 50% could be divided up as the teacher saw fit. I’ve actually never had a “test” category at all. I have “Quizzes,” and they usually make up about 10%. I guess if a school told me to have 40% tests, I’d have to call an essay a test. I don’t know for the life of me how I’d come up with five in a semester…

Here’s the thing: I know I’m a good teacher, and that’s not who parents are worried about with grade questions. However, education cannot make rules for the lowest common denominator, or it will lose people like me. Discretion to customize my teaching is very important to me. I’m comfortable with parameters, like curriculum requirements or a grade cap on homework, but if teaching comes in a can, I may not want to do it. I now love the part new teachers struggle with—the planning, the customization, the organizing. Somewhere there are adult people who had me my first year of teaching, and I wish I could go back and teach them again with what I know now. The medical profession has a very long training and residency program; education does not. It doesn’t expect that much training, and it certainly doesn’t pay enough to support it, so sadly for our first students, many of us teachers learn on the job. Learning how to manage a fair and effective class average can be part of that learning curve, and if new teachers had more support, system-wide grade standardizations wouldn’t be necessary. Nanci, your questions go to the heart of the matter. In today’s more challenging classroom climate, are Americans willing to pay for more prepared, more qualified teachers or not?

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

What Do Grades Really Measure?

When I feel my ideas growing and changing, it almost always hurts, like someone turning a great big crank in my head that doesn’t get used often enough. I’ve been thinking about grades and grading lately, and I’m not sure which way is up anymore.

As a student, I enjoyed a positive relationship with grades. I honestly believed that grades measured my mastery of content, my learning. If I earned a 93% on a test, I believed that I had demonstrated comprehension and retention of 93% of the expected material. If I earned a 93% on an essay, I believed that I successfully expressed my points in written form. It felt clean and straight-forward to me, and I enjoyed the extrinsic measure of my intrinsically motivated hard work and intelligence. It seemed to me that American society rewards extrinsic measures, and I didn’t do well in most of them. We didn’t have a lot of money, I wasn’t the prettiest girl, and I didn’t possess athletic ability. I was smart, and my grades proved it. Like the season records of sporting teams I didn’t make, my grades showed that I did something well.

When I first started teaching, I used a grade formula that gave almost all the weight to tests and essays. When report card time came around, it distressed me to see that students who took two tests and wrote one essay could score a B in my class despite missing lots and lots of homework and class assignments while kids who really worked hard but had trouble testing nearly failed. I restructured my grade formula to give more weight to homework and class assignments. I didn’t teach honors kids like I had been; I taught students who sometimes struggled to learn or struggled to prioritize learning, and I felt that I needed to let all the practice and effort count.

Currently, I teach in an English department that requires a certain number of essays to pass the course. If students skip or fail even one of the essays, they do not pass the course. We call them Core Assignments. In a composition class, my assignments tend to build in difficulty: the first essay can be first person with no quotations; the second essay requires quotations and third person voice, and the third essay is a big research project. If students skip the research essay, for example, they wouldn’t have demonstrated the mastery of writing that students who struggle through it will demonstrate.

Recently, I’ve started reading Bill Ferriter over at The Tempered Radical. He’s a middle school teacher who doesn’t give zeros anymore. Now, he’s in a school system that supports his efforts with scheduling and duty assignments. I’m not teaching twelve year olds; in high school and beyond, the GPA becomes a nationwide phenomena that’s difficult to duck. However, the concept that I’m using grades to reflect punishment and reward rather than to measure learning took my breath. I’ve spent some time asking my colleagues: Does a student’s grade measure what he or she has learned or reflect how much he or she has turned in?

What should a grade measure? One colleague said that bosses don’t want employees who do one or two jobs brilliantly but skip everything else assigned to them. Grades, she reasoned, reflect a mixture of content and skill mastery along with work behaviors. If parents or students want to break out learning mastery from work behavior issues, that can be done by looking at the exact numbers contributing to the student’s grade. Ferriter argues that grades should measure purely learning, and he assesses work behaviors separately on a rubric that is not numerically represented in the grade. Should single assessments like tests and essays measure learning as opposed to quarter grades? Are grades really a measure of cooperation as much as learning? Is that okay?

Years ago, a close teaching friend and I argued over the concept of a school without grades. At that time, I wanted to know if all the sports teams at such a school would also forgo scoring, based upon my own relationship with grades as a student. Yet whenever I’ve defended grades, I’ve done so because I believed they measured something more worthwhile than obedience. I’ve always taken late work because I agree that work worth doing is worth doing late, but I’ve always taken some points off. I don’t think I’ve asked myself if the grades I give as a teacher measure what I believed the grades I received as a student did. Sigh. I’ve got more thinking to do on this one…

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

"Teacher, What's my Grade?"

Ten years ago, this question played a normal part of my teaching life. Occasionally, I printed out grades (names obscured by a code, of course) and taped them to the door, so students could see where they stood. A few kids might keep track of their grades in the back of their notebooks, but essentially, if they wanted to know the real numbers, they had to ask me.

As we rolled into the twenty-first century, however, school districts and technology made some changes. For about the past five years, I’ve been logging student grades into a Learning Management System that makes those grades available through the Internet. If the assessment isn’t an essay, I often have the grade posted by the end of the day; it just helps me keep track if I don’t let entering the grades pile up. Students’ averages are calculated by the minute, for them to stare at and for their parents to critique.

So now when a student strolls into class and says, “What’s my grade?” my chest clutches a little, and I hear, “I’ve got a bone to pick with you.” Unlike the old days, this student has access to all his or her grades. The question has come to mean, “What the hell are you doing to my grade?” Getting defensive isn’t helpful. I try to remember that despite the consumer/product nature of LMS grading systems, it is just a tool, and I am still the teacher. I try to smile and say, “Why, let’s look at it together, okay?” I know that this is Stage 1)—the stage where the student and I look at the potential problem. Stage 2) brings in the cavalry, and that can be exhausting…

Most of the time, the student has turned in make-up work that I have not graded and entered yet. LMS grading systems obscure the fact that I, a human being, am doing the grading and entering the data. Its instantaneous automation creates a false sense of “real time” for students. If they turn something in at 2 p.m., they expect to see it on the grading system by 6 p.m. While I do accept late work, I don’t usually grade it right away. Once students are sure I have their late work, they usually leave our meeting satisfied.

Sometimes, the problem rests with user error. Some students may be able to access their grades, but they don’t really understand how to read an incomplete course average, which can also be assuaged with two or three minutes of help from me. It is true that every so often, “What’s my grade?” leads to a testy confrontation, but really, that happened when I taped grades to the door, too. Something about the LMS grading system makes me feel more vulnerable. I guess because I used to decide when grades would receive the most scrutiny. I didn’t tape the grades up unless all the make-up work was entered or before I’d nagged students to make up missing tests. Now the grades are available for scrutiny 100% of the time. I’m organized—I’m smart—I can handle it! However, I am sorry that “What’s my grade?” now makes my back stiffen…

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Saturation Point

March rears her head in just a day or so, and with her, she brings the state testing for which I’ve been preparing my students. The only thing I’m confident about is that I am more concerned, more prepared, and more focused about the testing than any of my students appear to be.

I am pacing myself through grading the piles of practice essays, forcing myself to stop when I grow inattentive instead of rushing through the last ones in the pile just so I can say I got it done. No, I step back, exist under the nagging sense that grading is waiting for me and return to it with a fresher eye the next morning. This kind of discipline grows from my belief that careful, specific grading on my part will inspire students to careful, specific editing on their part the next time they write.

My students’ attendance grows increasingly spotty at this time of year; there’s not much on the calendar to look forward to besides our testing dates, and I suppose I grow more serious and disturbingly earnest around this time, too. I might do a mini-lesson here and there of something fun or interesting, but the major thrust of each lesson now is test preparation; we administer it in two weeks time. Things students do frequently, like working on an out of class assignment while I’m reviewing a lesson, upset me more as we enter this phase of test preparation. I get tense—“Listen! Pay attention! Please trust me that I know what you should be doing!”

If history repeats itself, the majority of my students will do fine, and I will relax again. It’s just that saturation point in the semester. I’ve taught them the test skills. They’ve gained much of what they will gain. I can’t move on yet—the test is nigh. I need to hold them here, reinforcing, emphasizing, (sometimes) begging. It’s not the time of year that made me want to be a teacher, but it is one of the required elements, at least at this point in educational politics.

It’s the time of the year when I feel like my students should know certain things, and when they don’t, I take it personally. (If I really link my mental health to students’ mastery of the semi-colon or apostrophe, I could be doomed.) It’s the time of the year when the end seems merely theoretical. It’s the time of the year when we as teachers need to breathe fresh air into our own lungs as people beyond the classroom because until the testing is over, the air at school has gone a bit stale. I’ve hit my saturation point. It’s time to meet my classroom responsibilities while casting my horizon outside the school door. An art project, a new fiction author, plans for a weekend trip—there are various ways to remind myself that while I use teaching to define who I am, teaching doesn’t have to define my entire life, especially when it becomes so test-preparation centered. This weekend, I’m going to try to focus upon the things I really like about being a literate adult. Sometimes teaching writing makes me forget the joys of reading and writing; without that joy, I know I’ll lose the spark that makes teaching worthwhile, and that’s too high a cost for any test.

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Help Me Ruminate on this One...

A little vacation time allows me to plan a decent lesson for the first day back, liberates me to surf the Internet and find some cool resources, and gives me the energy to ruminate on the Bigger Questions facing education. In the Washington Post’s “Grading Disparities Peeve Parents: With No Baseline among Districts, Some Say Students Suffer,” Jay Mathews writes about something I don’t often hear discussed. His article focuses on the different grading standards between two school districts that are only miles from each other. One school district states that an A must be from 94 to 100 while the other says an A begins at 90; additionally, the two districts weight AP and IB courses differently in students’ averages. Mathews reports, “Standards for grading in the two counties, including bonus point calculations, are so out of sync that it appears possible for a Fairfax student to earn a 3.5 grade-point average for the same work that gets a Montgomery student a 4.6 GPA.” Fairfax parents fear this puts their children at a disadvantage for merit-based college scholarships.

When I first thought about it, I decided it wouldn’t make much difference whether an A needed to be a 90 or a 94. I’m an English teacher; I don’t give many objective, multiple-choice, three-points off for that assessments. When I read students’ writing, I decide whether the writing is A work, and then I assign the appropriate number. I use rubrics, and overall, I’d describe my grading as holistic. Then, I thought about the disparity between my grading an essay as an A versus the other members of my department. We norm for the five paragraph essay, sharing a state rubric and finding anchor papers together. The research essay, though, is a different kettle of fish. We have some shared core elements: students must use third person, at least five sources, and MLA format. After those fairly objective criteria, all bets are off. Is the student’s thesis clear? Is the argument logical? Are quotations embedded well? Did the student plagiarize? How much off for formatting errors? Spelling? I’d like to think we’d all fail the same essays, but I’m really uncertain we’d give the same essays A grades. I have a couple friends with whom I discuss grading often and at length. We read papers for each other to provide perspective on tricky issues. However, there are a dozen other people in my department with whom I don’t talk about this issue at all. Partly, we don’t talk about it because I think we already expect to disagree.

What’s going on in your schools? Do you and your colleagues grade together often or at all? Is there a clear model for an A assignment in your department? Do parents, students, and the guidance department know exactly who to take for the easy A?

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher