As I wrap up the year and say goodbye to students, I face my one of the more disliked parts of my job: grading.  If I were simple, it would just be a matter of points earned out of points possible, but of course I am not simple, and neither is that system to tell the truth.  What do points measure?  Accuracy?  Completion?  Effort?  Creativity?  The miracle of a student turning something in?

I'm not a numbers person--even Sudoku makes my eyes cross.  So when it comes to final grades, I take a more holistic approach because it's impossible for me to boil down four months of academic and personal interaction with a child to a single number or letter.  The percentage grade is certainly a good indicator, but sometimes there are confounding situations:

1. A student who does next to no work but whose test scores show he has obviously learned the material through some other means (osmosis? telepathy? divine intervention?)
2. A student who does next to no work for the majority of the semester, then has a come-to-Jesus-moment and tries very hard to turn things around at the last minute, but can't quite make the numbers work in his favor
3. A student who is identified as special ed halfway through the semester, too late to be placed in an applied class or to have an intervention specialist placed to work with her
4. A student who works hard but is frequently absent, which poses especial difficulty in my class because I don't give very much bookwork or similar assignments that can be made up at home

I am considering long and hard whether to pass these four (and many, many others).  My rationale so far...

1. In our school, the most salient goal is to get students to pass the OGT, regardless of what anyone says otherwise.  Student 1's practice assessment scores show that he would most likely pass.  Furthermore, given my knowledge of the child, even if I failed him and forced him to take the class again...there wouldn't be much difference in his performance.  But his percentage is very low
2. Student 2's last-minute turnaround indicates that he could try harder next time, but I don't know that punishing his effort this time around in order to teach him about work ethic would be productive.  He has higher percentage than student 1 and is actually close to the objective 60% cutoff.
3. I asked the intervention specialist who's been working with Student 3 for the last few weeks to bring her grade up whether I should pass her, and she told me I should because the student has worked hard and should never have been in a regular-ed classroom in the first place.  While I don't feel completely comfortable with this, my understanding of special ed needs is rudimentary at best, and so I usually defer to the experts.
4. I am very close to Student 4, so I'm trying extra hard to be objective.  Her first quarter grade should have been an F, but I gave her a D because I knew she was fragile enough that an F might shut her down completely.  When she asked me about it, I told her simply that I gave her a D because I knew it would encourage her in a way that an F wouldn't, and she was very touched.  She usually works hard in class--when she is there--and has taken advantage of the credit recovery opportunities I grudgingly offered at the beginning of May.  She wants to succeed, but her test scores were low this year and she would probably benefit from either taking the class again or getting some intensive tutoring after school.  She has yet to turn in her final project and was not present for the exam period today because of illness.  My thought is that if she turns in a high-quality final, I will go ahead and pass her with the strict admonition to buckle down with test prep before the October test.

I'm probably making this more complicated than necessary, as I tend to do with most things.  But while details like numbers don't make much sense to me, the details of an individual life do, and I try to take those into account when grading, because aren't those individual lives what I'm in here for in the first place?

In college I took Animal Physiology with Dr. Joe Williams, and he liked to start lecture with something he called "Happy Minute," which entailed some sort of funny picture or joke that he would put on the projector.  Poor Joe invariably ran into technology issues, though, and his Happy Minute often stretched into five or ten or fifteen.  In addition, some most of his humor was just...not very funny.  Maybe it was generational.  After a few weeks of this I resigned myself to wasting 5-15 minutes of each lecture and made sure to bring a crossword puzzle with me.

Fast forward three years and I still remember Joe Williams, not necessarily for his work on hyperthermia in the Arabian oryx, but for Happy Minute.  I now begin most classes by showing downloaded YouTube clips of people getting in accidents, children acting stupid, cute fuzzy animals, or some combination of the above, and many of my students ask what the daily video is.  Why do I do this?  Mostly for my own entertainment, since I never get tired of watching David After Dentist or You're the Best Chinese Hurdler Around, but it gives kids something to pay attention to while they're waiting for their computers to boot up and I'm taking attendance and dealing with other housekeeping issues.  It also lightens the mood and gives them something to smile about.  No, there is no ultimate academic purpose to it, but I hope they remember it just as I remember dear Joe Williams and his Happy Minute.

Just in time for the new semester, my classroom-mate (aka our school's tech guy) got a shiny new cart full of 35 shiny new Netbooks, which means I get them too!  It's only a slight exaggeration to say that having the computers has completely changed the way I teach...after all, I still fall in sinks and throw things everywhere by accident, but I don't really expect that to change any time soon.

1. I have exponentially reduced the amount of paper I use.  I printed syllabi and a few other things out of habit last week, but I'm finding that the only things I really want in hard copy are homework and test/project assignments.  It's easy enough to administer introductions, quizzes, exit/entrance tickets, etc. online without all the fuss of piles of paper flying around.  It also means I'm not fighting for the copier at 8:00 in the morning nearly as often!

2. I've also reduced my grading load.  One, because Schoology (the classroom management site our school has adopted) can grade objective questions for me, and two--here's my dirty little secret--I don't actually grade a lot of what they submit as introductions, discussion posts, etc.  But having the electronic trail gives me an objective way to gauge student participation and engagement, which is one of the intangibles I keep in mind when it grade-rounding/mercy killings roll around.  Plus, if they think I'm grading it, they're more likely to do it.  Muahaha.

3. I'm still training my kiddos in this, but with the majority of our in-class work aside from labs, tests, and homework being available online, I'm hoping that it will be easier for kids to keep up with work when they miss class.  Actually, that just gave me the idea of putting up a homework discussion page.

4.  It was actually my principal who helped me see this after she did an observation this morning, but I have noticed a significant reduction in cell phone activity during class.  Some of that may have to do with the particular batch of kids I have this semester compared to last, but I think the computers have something to do with it as well.  Many kids today are so used to being connected to something digital that just the physical presence of the computer may calm that itch enough that they don't feel compelled to text every ten seconds...wonder of wonders!

Schoology is enough like Facebook that it gives the sort of social network feel, but it allows us to get our work done.  It's a little clunky in places, and getting everyone signed in and remembering their password is a royal pain in the tush, but hopefully if there is wide enough adoption throughout the school (and there are 3 other teachers in 2 other content areas with the laptops), eventually that won't be as big of a problem.


Tomorrow I'm going to introduce the magic of Google Docs for taking notes, and this week's big assignment is to create an actual profile page for a cell organelle.  I am so proud of myself for wrangling up a student-editable site AND a working template.  And that is probably my technological achievement quota for the year, as evidenced by me blowing up my computer earlier this evening.

Subtitle: Why I Sometimes Hate Snow Days


We ended up having a 2.75-day school week, which is not the best way to start out a new semester, in my opinion.  (To their credit, thought, my new kiddos actually did a pretty good job of staying focused...maybe there will be cookies for them!)  There's a lack of continuity that bugs me because the kids and I haven't had a chance to gel real well yet, but I know that will come in time.  I'm just impatient to get going, I guess!

The other thing that has made this week seem a bit like Groundhog Day is the constant fluctuation in my enrollments.  On Tuesday I started out with 24 and 22 officially enrolled in my two classes.  By Friday, I had 26 and 17.  Did I mention that my room currently only has seating for 24?  Fortunately, 2 of the kids on my official roster for that class are on home instruction or the alternative program, so we are at exact capacity for the time being.  The ones who were pulled out of my last period class failed physical science last semester and are repeating the course.  I've only had one of my failures from last semester show up again, and I'm hoping that if he's with us the whole semester (he spent the first two months in JDC) he'll do better.

Then there are absences from illness or the weather, and all in all, it's just been one crazy little week trying to get everyone off the ground with our shiny new Netbooks (more to come on those hopefully tomorrow) and just sort of plugged in to our emerging class culture.  On Monday I want to go over the idea of CRED again and appoint the first class officers.  I've held off on printing attendance rosters because, oh yeah, I'm still not entirely sure who's in which class!

Even though there were only three days between the end of first semester and the start of second, it almost felt like a brand new school year.  The orderliness of my desk has reached its semester high and will rapidly deteriorate from here...

More significantly, I have a brand new batch of students.  Admittedly, I was a little nervous about starting from scratch building relationships with new kids, but it was much less scary than the beginning of the year because several students had already said hi to me last week, and lots of my kiddos from last semester popped in yesterday too.  It was so much nicer to be surrounded by friendly and familiar faces!

Mugging with 3/4 on the last day of regular class

One of the teachers at my student teaching placement advised me to stay away from teacher's lounge gossip concerning students, and I definitely heard a lot of negative things about many of my new students before the semester started.  But I really wanted to give each one a clean slate because I believe that students--like all people--grow into your expectation of them, at least in part.  So I stuck with my plans for a student-developed code of classroom conduct, and intend to try my class officer system.  Ran out of time to introduce it with my 3/4 class, but my 8/9 students seemed interested in the idea and even suggested that it be for extra credit, which I'm okay with doing since it is extra work.  The irony is that if they fulfill all the requirements for being class officer in the first place, chances are they won't need extra credit.  But if it makes them feel better...

Class Officer Responsibilities

• Community: Take attendance every day and collect any tardy slips.
• Respect: Mark those who are not in their seats when the tardy bell rings and choose from the list of appropriate penalties.
• Effort: Keep track of who leaves the room using the hall pass or a nurse’s pass.
• Discipline: Update the assignment sheet with the day’s assignments.

Class Officer Qualifications

• Attendance: To qualify for class officer, a student must have been present in class for the past 5 consecutive days.
• Tardies: To qualify for class officer, a student must have no more than 1 class tardy in the past 10 days.
• Detentions/Referrals: To qualify for class officer, a student must have no more than 1 detention during the current quarter and no office referrals from this class.
• Missing Assignments: To qualify for class officer, a student must have turned in all assignments due the previous week.

I also had a much better idea of how to start the semester with a bang than I did at the beginning of the year.  Instead of running through the syllabus first thing, I cut out instructions for building Legos and glued each step on a different index card, which I distributed as students came in the door.  When the bell rang, I dumped Legos on the desks and told them they had five minutes to take their first quiz--go!  Everyone scrambled to build their individual step first, then they gradually figured out that they had pieces of the same puzzles.  This gave me a chance to quickly scope out group dynamics: who are the class clowns, the chatterboxes, the cheerleaders (not in the stereotypical sense but those who lift the class's spirits), the omniscient observers, etc.  I also had them write their names on popsicle sticks which I want to use during discussions this semester since the class sizes are bigger.  We talked about how the Lego activity modeled the scientific process and the kids came up with a pretty decent list after some prompting: observation, inference, prediction, testing, collaboration, and tentativeness.  Then we went over class expectations and I had the kids start working on their own definition of CRED.

Here's hoping for a happy new semester!

P.S. Shouldn't we get double the experience for teaching two "yearlong" courses in one year??

Even though there were only three days between the end of first semester and the start of second, it almost felt like a brand new school year.  The orderliness of my desk has reached its semester high and will rapidly deteriorate from here...

More significantly, I have a brand new batch of students.  Admittedly, I was a little nervous about starting from scratch building relationships with new kids, but it was much less scary than the beginning of the year because several students had already said hi to me last week, and lots of my kiddos from last semester popped in yesterday too.  It was so much nicer to be surrounded by friendly and familiar faces!

Mugging with 3/4 on the last day of regular class

One of the teachers at my student teaching placement advised me to stay away from teacher's lounge gossip concerning students, and I definitely heard a lot of negative things about many of my new students before the semester started.  But I really wanted to give each one a clean slate because I believe that students--like all people--grow into your expectation of them, at least in part.  So I stuck with my plans for a student-developed code of classroom conduct, and intend to try my class officer system.  Ran out of time to introduce it with my 3/4 class, but my 8/9 students seemed interested in the idea and even suggested that it be for extra credit, which I'm okay with doing since it is extra work.  The irony is that if they fulfill all the requirements for being class officer in the first place, chances are they won't need extra credit.  But if it makes them feel better...

Class Officer Responsibilities

• Community: Take attendance every day and collect any tardy slips.
• Respect: Mark those who are not in their seats when the tardy bell rings and choose from the list of appropriate penalties.
• Effort: Keep track of who leaves the room using the hall pass or a nurse’s pass.
• Discipline: Update the assignment sheet with the day’s assignments.

Class Officer Qualifications

• Attendance: To qualify for class officer, a student must have been present in class for the past 5 consecutive days.
• Tardies: To qualify for class officer, a student must have no more than 1 class tardy in the past 10 days.
• Detentions/Referrals: To qualify for class officer, a student must have no more than 1 detention during the current quarter and no office referrals from this class.
• Missing Assignments: To qualify for class officer, a student must have turned in all assignments due the previous week.

I also had a much better idea of how to start the semester with a bang than I did at the beginning of the year.  Instead of running through the syllabus first thing, I cut out instructions for building Legos and glued each step on a different index card, which I distributed as students came in the door.  When the bell rang, I dumped Legos on the desks and told them they had five minutes to take their first quiz--go!  Everyone scrambled to build their individual step first, then they gradually figured out that they had pieces of the same puzzles.  This gave me a chance to quickly scope out group dynamics: who are the class clowns, the chatterboxes, the cheerleaders (not in the stereotypical sense but those who lift the class's spirits), the omniscient observers, etc.  I also had them write their names on popsicle sticks which I want to use during discussions this semester since the class sizes are bigger.  We talked about how the Lego activity modeled the scientific process and the kids came up with a pretty decent list after some prompting: observation, inference, prediction, testing, collaboration, and tentativeness.  Then we went over class expectations and I had the kids start working on their own definition of CRED.

Here's hoping for a happy new semester!

P.S. Shouldn't we get double the experience for teaching two "yearlong" courses in one year??

I went ahead and made my own classroom logo, which I don't want to call a bullseye because it's really a holon, but I don't know how well students will react to the word "holon."  (Actually, I just realized that maybe it could be reversed, putting critique in the middle and then the idea of a target might make more sense...I'll have to ponder the semantics of that.)