Grading Policy hullaballooooooo

There is an inexplicable push for standardized grading policies among teachers at various levels. PLTs are being asked to describe their collective vision of a coherent grading policy within their group. It's entirely possible that there is no collective vision or common threads in how grades noted for students. If so, then a more robust conversation about the right way and the wrong way to assign grades is needed. Beyond that, having common grading policies that everyone adheres to is unnecessary conformity that sullies what a public school should be: experimental and experiential.

It's a tedious discussion, though. I've been through it numerous times, and I still maintain my own system, and nobody's been aggrieved, which implies equity was proffered to all, and the end grades were earned based on a given standard, a Kandah-standard.

The overriding philosophy shouldn't be the grades, but should be the level and variety of tasks we ask our students to do. These tasks should appeal to multiple modalities, and represent the diversity present in a classroom. Such an atmosphere motivates students to submit better quality work.

There has been no mandate thus far from anyone in education outside of my pay grade to create and execute a common grading policy. Talk of it is rumour, and paltry rumour at that. Stressors about our policy being published at a district level, somewhere on the district website, are wholly unnecessary. At the beginning of each year we communicate with parents are grading policies, students are trained in its intricacies - among some teachers, byzantine intricacies, whose complexity staggers - and this level of communication should suffice. Consistency in applying the grades throughout the year, and contacting parents whose children are failing, and providing tutoring possibilities before school, after school and during the day, all these drives are part of an adequate grading policy. In other words, let's not spend so much professional time on the subject.

The problems arises also in how teachers return graded work. It's a truism that if a student submits work to you, they have a right to reclaim it. Grading work is one of the more tedious tasks of the modern teacher, but still the work should be critiqued and returned in a timely manner to the students. They need feedback regularly through a teacher's marks. Sure some work, quick formative assessments, for example, work that provides teachers with data to modify instruction, needn't always be returned, they can be tossed. But essays, papers, projects, tests and quizzes. We assign them teachers, the students make good on their end of the bargain and do the work, we then critique it, and return it. What's the student's role at this point? To examine all mistakes, learn from them, and file the assignment away for later review.

I'm rambling. Using this blog as a way to vent. And express my ideas on the current state of American public education.

Today was Graduation at Enloe High School, 8 AM, Raleigh Convention Center. A perfectly executed ceremony that took almost exactly one hour, as they said. I wish all the students the best in their future endeavors. I managed to see several of the seniors I taught this year, and I enjoyed chatting with them and their parents. I have great students at Enloe. Relationship building is such a vital role in human existence, and high-school should be the time to begin solidifying the ego and controlling more limbic behavioral responses to the inevitable conflict that arises among fellow humans. In any case, the ceremony and reception was enjoyable.