Day 10 - Grading

I'm typing this blog while I obsessively check the negotiations hotline (952-736-6471) to see how today's round of bargaining went. It's 9:30 pm and it's not yet updated. Is that good? Are they just kicking in and hammering out all the details of a tentative agreement? Or are they in a knock down drag out fight? Should I be popping the champagne or figuring out bail money for our negotiators?

Tomorrow is the deadline for entering midquarters. Holy moly, do I hate grading. Not assessment mind you - I love figuring out what my students understand and how to improve their performance. It's accounting for points to assign a letter that I hate. First off, correcting and data entry are an ADHD nightmare. In fact, the some of the tests that check for ADHD look a lot like EZ Grade Pro. However it's trying to fit an entire description of a student's progress, effort, and understanding into one letter and two stock sentence fragments that really sends me. Do parents understand that a D with the comments "low test scores" and "good participation" means the kid is struggling with the material and needs additional support from some other source that we are looking into, but is getting all her homework in, taking risks in class, and has terrific persistence skills - so you shouldn't ground her for a month but rather cheer her on as she fights her way through algebra?

I've been tempted to just call all 147 of my students and spend fifteen minutes with each parent updating them fully. When I do the math and realize that it would take just under 40 hours, I come back to earth. Also, when I realize the only way to get parents on the phone would be to call in the evening, I am kind of glad for work to rule.

This is why support for parent communication is my top personal workload priority. If the time I spend calling, emailing, writing, or otherwise updating parents could be recognized it would be a huge improvement. Virtually everyone in the district office and on the board says increased parent communication is vital. It's time they put their money where their rhetoric is.