A moment of celebration

As the year ends and a new semester is knocking at the door, I thought it might be prudent to take a momentary break from my hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing over a new grading system and look at a few successes from this past semester.

May you find many successes to celebrate in the coming year!

1. This is NOT an AVID student:

This kid isn't a valedictorian, and perhaps not even on Honor Roll. But this kid is a solid, good student who regularly takes Cornell notes, interacts with them, shares them and learns from the process.

It's taken a mountain of work from teachers, students and admins across campus for this success to materialize, and it's a particular dream of mine for students across our district to adopt a process that promotes inquiry, collaboration and ownership of learning among our adorable kids.

When I saw this kidlet reviewing notes just before taking the final, I knew we are on the right track.

2. Reflection and student self-assessment:

When I started running, I remember reaching nine minutes of continuous running was a huge milestone for me. It took weeks of effort, and it was HARD. I try to remember those moments, now that running for nine straight minutes wouldn't even grab my attention.

I'm somewhere in that early Couch-to-5K stage with my efforts to increase opportunities for reflection and self-assessment in my classroom. One part of these early "training runs" was a major culminating assignment for my students: creating blogs and reflecting on the semester.

I gave a few guidelines: write four posts, each with a particular focus. I asked for a minimum of 250 words, showed them how to create a Blogger account and sent them on their way.


I was pleased with the variety of responses from students. Nearly every reading and writing assignment was identified by at least one student as the most powerful. Most students' work was truly insightful, focusing on growth and goals that might be impossible for me to notice among more than 100 students.

And kids had the chance to exercise their writing chops in a personal and unique way.

I also used more Learning Logs and Cornell note summaries to promote reflection.

We're moving, slowly, toward the goal of student self-assessment as a cornerstone of learning in my classroom.









3. Coming soon to the airwaves: The voices of my students!

For more than a year, I've been trying to figure out the best way to have my students create podcasts, which could build their skills in reflection, self-assessment, speaking, listening, understanding audience ... I could go on and on.

Thanks to a very generous gift from folks on Donors Choose, and to my awesome friend who strong-armed me into creating a Donors Choose project, you may soon hear these kidlets, loudly and clearly.

Check out this beauty:
 

The plan is for my students to continue their blogs, with an emphasis on goal-setting for the semester, and then use those musings to start making podcasts. Eventually, I'd like kids to podcast about issues important to them, as we navigate what for most of my students is the last semester of high school.

I'll keep you posted. :)

What successes are you celebrating?

An open letter to the men who tried to kill me ...

First, thank you.

When you broke into our house on December 22, 1981, you weren't able to put your hands on me, but you did swat my life into a new trajectory. Your actions that night remain a defining event in my life.

When there's a quality in the air, the misty sensation of this time of year, and this day comes around again, I can feel my senses heighten, and I see more, hear more than at any other time of the year. I no longer have to remind myself, as Hemingway noticed, to be strong in the broken places. It's simply a time for observation and reflection. That this coincides with the Christmas season has brought great joy into my life, and for that I thank you again.

Throughout all these years, I've imagined what I would say to these men if I ever had the chance to encounter them. For the first few years, I would imagine this sit-down would have to include lots of security, as my main feeling was fear. Fear that enveloped my entire soul.

Then, I grew angry. Angry that I'll spend my whole life scanning the scene for possible threats, possible exit strategies, items I can use as weapons. When this became too dominant in my life, I sought professional help, and that led to lots of inner reflection about other forces in my life, and for that, again I thank you.

On some level, when you picked our house, you set in motion the forces that would make me a teacher someday. As a secure adult, someone staring down 50, with hobbies that inspire me, good friends that support me and a husband whose voice still makes me weak, I'm now just curious about who you were.

I wonder where you grew up, who your family is, what happened to you in school. Did you struggle as a student? Did someone try to help? Did you have a connection with a successful and caring adult at some point? Did a coach challenge you, show you how to play on a team and work hard to meet each little goal? Where did the break happen, where robbery and murder became a path for you? (I'm not naive - I know these men probably had mental health issues, likely drug problems, and really, they're probably long dead, as such a violent path usually doesn't translate to a long life.)

I sometimes try to look at my kids through this lens. If we are all batting each other around, affecting each other's lives for better or worse, what can I do to swat my kids onto a path that will inspire them to treat each other well, to work hard at something that lifts them up? When I get it right, I owe you thanks for giving me the questions.

You might want to know that your influence now runs into a new generation. Because I was able to escape that night, I lived long enough to give birth to a beautiful little girl, who is now preparing for a life in social work. Her passion for her studies inspires me, and I'm so proud of her for making it her life's work to help others.

So, I owe you a great deal.

You had no way of knowing my father would die on this same day, many years later. This will be the 15th Christmas without my dad. It's impossible to calculate the impact a loving, supportive and educated man has on a girl when he believes she can do anything, be anything she wants. My dad lives in every cell in my body. I wonder if you had someone like that in your life.

You are a part of these two December 22 anniversaries, and while you may not have ever known it, you and I are forever connected. When I manage to do good in this world, I do it - partly - in your name.

Thank you.

Like asking Sinatra for help singing ...

I try to be an elegant, erudite and articulate professional, but sometimes I turn into a geeky fangirl, and I just can't help it.

It happened again at the recent AVID National Conference in San Diego. Super Hero Educator Pedro Noguera was the key note speaker Friday morning and then hosted a "continuing the conversation" session, where I was willing to stand for more than an hour to soak up his insights into all things education in our country. (Luckily, a seat in the front opened at the last minute, and I made a mad dash for it.)

And then, when he finished his Q & A and nobody approached him, I sprinted to the man to see what he had to say about my current nagging problem:

With a 50-point grading scale, students can do well with tons of missing work. So my whole goal of focusing on learning instead of racking up points seems to have resulted in possible learning with no regard for completing assignments. Not exactly the purposeful journey into student wisdom that I had in mind.

Here I am, trying to explain this while simultaneously shaking with nerves in the presence of Dr. Noguera:



His advice: If I want students to do the work, I have to be there while they do it.

Sure enough, the assignments kids blow off are the practice stuff I assign as homework. The rhetorical precis in my AP class, AR in my senior classes. The tasks we work on together, such as collaborative, multi-step exercises along the lines of Cornell notes and essays, my kids ARE turning in those assignments. So ... hmmm.

I will certainly change how students complete rhetorical precis next semester. Those are such an important key to developing analytical reading and writing skills that I will refocus and carve out class time for those assignments.

However, in the same way I cannot keep my cool around really awesome people, at some cellular level, I cannot devote a bunch of time to good old sustained silent reading in my class. Come at me, if you will. But SSR in my classroom has resulted in a huge waste of valuable face-to-face time. I only see those kids for two hours every other day. That's my only time to work with them, create a culture, simply be with those little folks. No way I'm spending that time watching them turn pages. But ... I'm thinking about book groups, book chats, something collaborative that ties out-of-class reading to meaningful in-class reflection.

Chime in, folks who make that work.

Adventures in grading: The next chapter

It seems some people were born with a teacher's soul. They can teach naturally, the way a gifted athlete can be seen in the first steps of a toddler.

That's not me.

Some people always have known they would be teachers. They played school and dreamed of their own classrooms. I loved the idea of being a writer, of traveling across the globe and telling stories. If you asked 20-year-old me about my future, I would have quite passionately and confidently explained that I would soon be a writer for Rolling Stone and married to a rock star, penning my incisive prose backstage, sitting on an amp.

But before I was even good at it, I completely fell out of love with journalism and completely in love with teaching students.

I sacrificed this for you, children!

Appreciate me! (photo from @theselvedgeyard)

I had to grow my own teacher's soul from days and hours and years in front of kids.

One of my earliest meditations concerned whether I was teaching or whether I was assigning. That distinction is another part of what fueled this experiment with the grading scale.

So, as in my previous examination of grades in my AP class, the goal in my senior college-prep English class is to de-emphasize points and tasks in favor of an emphasis on learning and reflection.

I'm using the same truncated 50 to 100 scale with my seniors, but fewer of the assignments are formative. (My AP kids take many more tests and complete many more writing assignments, so I guess it stands to reason that they would have more formative assignments.)

With 14 weeks under my belt, here are my observations from senior English:

Nearly everybody will pass senior English:

When we return from Thanksgiving each year, I send my annual holiday "here's who might fail this class" email to counselors. I may not send it this year. Out of 65 students, only two or three students are at risk for failing.

Now, those kids, including one who is habitually absent, aren't passing like champs. With a floor of 50 percent for their grades, they are pulling less than 60 percent. They aren't meeting college admissions requirements, but they can, even at this point, dig themselves out of the hole they've created.

For me, it has always been important for kids to have this lifeline. But I want it to be an honest hope, not a fill-out-this-assignment-from-September hope. With three or fewer kids in this boat, I can pull them aside after they've gone back over what they missed and sit down with them, chat a bit about sonnets and Beowulf and ethos, pathos and logos and see for myself if they've learned the material.

Everybody else, the vast crowd who has been showing up, writing, reflecting, reading, etc. - they will pass.

Time, sweet time, to figure it out:

Long story short: I love Cornell notes. Sad ending: Kids hate Cornell notes.

No doubt in large part because my colleagues are using Cornell notes, my students have a much better attitude toward taking, keeping, reflecting on, reworking and summarizing their notes this year.

And because this grading scale is so forgiving, students have more time to figure out how to take Cornell notes productively, in a way that helps them instead of merely earning them a few points. We spent a respectable chunk of class time this semester going through the Cornell note process: sharing, inquiring, reflecting, etc.

I'm not finding student notes, with information they copied taking up two thirds of the page and an empty space on the other third, crumpled in the trash.

If students took a poor set of notes, no big deal. We talked about it, set a goal and moved on. There was no effect on students' grades when they received one or two low grades.

The problem that needs to be fixed:

We use Accelerated Reader, and in my class, AR counts for 20 percent of the overall grade. Many students (and some fellow teachers and counselors) believe that failure to complete AR is what leads to a student failing English,

Not so.

I use a VERY generous scale, elongated so that a student who earns merely eight points in a grading period earns 70 percent for AR. We don't use reading logs; kids don't have reading goals. I have a master's degree in Education, with an emphasis in Reading, and I have no faith in the AR test for reading levels. I teach seniors. They can help elect the next President of the most powerful nation on Earth. They can pick a book on their own and live with the consequences.

But this grading scale automatically puts them at 50 percent, which is enough to keep whole crowds of kids content with their AR grade.

I teach kids who desperately need to read more, and this truncated scale may unintentionally de-emphasize independent reading.

My bad.

I'm not quite sure what to do about this dilemma, but I will be lost in thought about it during upcoming long runs.

Grading scale adventures

I have just the thinnest grasp of number sense, just enough to calculate the cost of a sales item or my Black Jack hand. And as any teacher will attest, knowing something doesn't mean you can explain it.

So, bear with me as I explain how I altered my grading scale this year. I understand it - I really do. But I will probably suck at explaining it.

Here's a start: This blog was written by a Super Cool Guy - no doubt more about him in a future blog - and it appeared last Spring when I was spending many long runs reflecting on what my grades really meant. And what I really wanted them to mean.

Here's the blog: David Cohen gives me ideas to chew on while I run ...

Before school started, my Super Mathematician and Techy friend helped me set up a grade book that sets the floor at 50. (I would have liked to have a scale of 0-50, but the Aeries program balks at that.)

Every since computers made this miracle possible, I keep weighted categories of grades.

Add to this my change (for the most part) last year to formative and summative assignments. Kids get a few points but always full credit for a formative assignment, with the idea that this is practice and they earn credit for practicing, not for the quality of the product on which they practiced. Then, I have a few summative assessments, where they need to show me what they've learned, and their grade is (presumably) based on the quality of their learning.

I just posted 12-week grades - like a boss, considering everything else that's gone on this six weeks. I'm going to start with my AP class and save my senior English class for another blog post.

Here's what I've noticed so far:

The vibe in my AP class is quite different:

Students take frequent AP-like reading tests that count for 30 percent of their grade. These are short, usually 10 or fewer questions. All except one at the end of the grading period are formative.

I haven't even sort of had time to look back at last year's class to see how they performed on these reading tests compared to my current scholars. But there's a distinct difference in how worked up my kids are about these tests.

Sure, these kids get anxious when it's a summative reading test, but what always disturbed me before was the auction atmosphere of test review, where kids try to barter for more points. I think of one particular very bright, very determined and very articulate young lady and realize nearly every memory of interacting with her includes her dickering for more points. Gah.

Hasn't happened this year. Not once.

Missing assignments aplenty in my AP class:

But don't think I've created a lush, richly bold utopia in my AP class. Kids are blowing off assignments like they just won the lottery so take your education, and the horse it rode in on, and shove it. And here's the deal:

It doesn't really matter.

I can't help myself ...

If a student is doing decently on vocabulary tests and completing decent work on summative assignments, zeroes here and there on formative assignments do essentially nothing to their grade. And so we find this:

I worry that my kids see how a missing assignment affects their grade in my class - hardly at all - and consider how a missing grade may affect them in another difficult class - quite a bit - and ... triage. I worry that they aren't putting in the practice because they have so much other stuff to do, and it just doesn't matter.

Until it matters, and that may be too late.

The answer might be more summative assignments.

I asked my kids why they are missing assignments; 18 out of 35 students responded to a Google Form survey (another awesome tool of which I'll no doubt sing praises soon.) A little more than 40 percent said they didn't complete work because they "didn't have time". I'm chalking that up as support for my triage theory.

But then there's this:

I don't feel bad about giving a zero for really awful work:

Mrs. Wensrich, my junior English teacher, would issue edicts against certain words or sentence types and declare those crimes an automatic "F". Took me at least two failed assignments to figure out she was serious, and then I learned,  really really learned, to stop using "really" in academic writing.

In my own classroom, I rarely have the heart to give no credit for work turned in to me. There was such a large gulf between passing and a zero, it just seemed cruelly uninspiring.

But, with the floor at 50, I've grown to embrace the zero, especially for the kid who continues to make the same careless errors I've been correcting since August. As it turns out, I mark a zero, and the grade book gives them 50 percent.

And I give a little nod to Mrs. Wensrich each time.

In sum:

It appears these changes have taken some of the focus off of grades and points, which is a large part of what I was hoping would happen.

The next step is to ensure that my students' energy is now channeled into learning, and learning with joy, if I can help it.

I'd love to hear your comments about grading scales and such. :)

I'm late. I thought this party started in October of 2015.

So many years ago, a hilarious incident happened when I hosted a baby shower. It was so long ago, this particular baby is in high school.

My so-funny-it-hurts friend showed up late for the 9 a.m. event, and as she walked in the door, she said, "Oh, I'm sorry. I thought this started at 9:22."

And here I am, starting to blog. Sorry - I thought this party started in Fall 2015.

I have lots to say - about education, about rural schools, about first-generation college goers, about late onset running, about why I can't buy a single bloody thing that works the moment you take it out of the box - and I hope to find an audience through this blog to share in these conversations.

Soon to come, I promise thee:

1. A list of my favorite bloggers.

2. A list of my favorite podcasts.

3. An actual professionally web-designed appearance

Soon to come, I warn you:

1. At least one whiny post about running and why I am so slow.

But first! Speaking of late to the party, this week I was introduced to Google Translate. I can't even, can't EVEN wait to share this with my students.

Here's the plan, so far:

They are writing letters to their personal heroes, and many of these letters are in Spanish. I hope to use Google Translate's photo thingy to see a little bit of what they are writing.

Often, my non-native speakers say something like, "There's this saying in Spanish, but I don't know how to say it in English." Boom! Google Translate microphone thingy!

I will report back. I promise!