I'm so far into the semester that I have no idea how many weeks we've been going for, and I'm not terribly looking forward to the next few of them. In the next 3 weeks, I have to write my classroom management plan, my placement field folio, and a teaching literacy philosophy, while make progress on my placement portfolio and completing a working prototype of my super secret project.
I hope my hair can handle all of pulling it will be asked to endure...
My teaching placement has been going well, for the most part. Aside from them going much slower than I'd like, and having to teach a level of mathematics that is not my preference, I think I have been learning a ton about myself as a teacher. For one, I don't do enough (in my inexperienced opinion) collecting of their work for a grade. I will be giving a text/quiz on Monday, and I realize that I haven't yet graded them on anything I've given them for this investigation.
It's not as if I haven't been giving them assignments, but in this school, homework completion rates are significantly lower than ideal. It sounds terrible to sell them short, but from experience, only about 10% of my students will actually do any homework assigned to them. At one point, I had a plan to check over their homework from the previous day using our CPS remote system, but we only got one question in before class ended. My plan was to hold them accountable the following day, but my cooperating teacher suggested that I just push on to the next section.
I need to get better at that... I think. Right?
I had them turn in some 'Exit Slips' to gauge their understanding, which I intended to give a participation score to, which I still may do yet, but I have been told that grading exit slips should be avoided. Gah!
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Otherwise, last week I had one day where I fell flat on my face, followed the next day by one of the better lessons given in that classroom this year. My cooperating teacher said that he was actually pretty engaged in the lesson, having distracted him from the work that he was trying to do off in the corner. If I can just get rid of the bad days, then we're in business!
This week should go by pretty quickly... We have a test tomorrow, professional development for the College of Ed on Tuesday, and our school has no students on Wednesday (the jury is still out on whether I need to drive in that day).
I think I'm going to spend the next 30 minutes or so depressingly writing down everything I need to get done in the next few weeks. Ugh.
1 comment:
I'll start with a couple of questions: What is the purpose of grading? Why do you think that you need to grade more of the student's work?
There is definitely a tension between formative assessment and graded work (and you seem to be expressing some of that). You can require that formative assessments get completed and give them credit for that but definitely don't want to grade it or it is defacto no longer formative assessment.
Hang in there with all you have to do.
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