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.