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Sunday, September 30, 2012

Another Voice

Check out this gentleman's comments: http://ventingmycynicism.blogspot.com/2012/09/no-zero-policies-and-failure-of.html.

Zero Grade Policy? First Consider This

I'm sure you've heard that one of the new crazes here in Bedlam (i.e., public high schools) is a Zero Grade Policy.

Sounds like a good idea to me: Zero grades. No grades at all. I mean, really, what good are they? Who can show me a human life made happier, more fulfilling or more successful in any meaningful way by high grades in secondary school?

Wait, what? That's not what is meant by a Zero Grade Policy? It's about not giving zeroes to student work? That's different.

I predict that this new policy will find fertile ground in the barren minds of the people who impose education policy on educators. For them, there is good reason to implement such a policy: Someone wrote a book in which he claimed it was a good idea. He pointed to some research that showed it was a good idea. The policy imposers almost understood the book (so it must've been good) and the author's use of research seemed to be valid (so it must've been).Then some school districts adopted the plan. Therefore, other school districts should fall in line and adopt it as well. That way, we'll all have that plan and that will be good.

Good God!

But while we wait and resist in the gentle and civil manner of teachers who tended to be the good, authority-pleasing kids in their school days, we should busy ourselves with asking some rudimentary questions about graded assignments.

Why do we assign work to be graded? How many graded tasks do we assign in, say, a quarter? Why do we assign that many? Would students learn just as much if we assigned fewer? Would we be better teachers if we didn't spend our weekends, especially the ones with blue skies, grading work that students didn't want to do and which 90% of them only took a cursory jab at?

Why do some students not turn in some or all of those assignments? Would we turn in those assignments if we were students?

As for the number of grades we "need" to have: The college classes in which I learned the most, the ones that inspired me to try to become an authority in some field or other, to become a guide through the Halls of Knowledge, in these classes I had exactly two grades: a midterm and a final. No safety nets, no gimmes, just two occasions during a quarter to demonstrate my newly gained expertise. I studied my butt off for those exams and I can quote that professor (Harry Morris) and the playwright he taught (some guy named Shakespeare) to this day.

I'm not saying this is how we should do it. I'm saying most of us are way overdoing it. In the process, we're inviting students to skip an assignment here or there or to perform half-heartedly on a few knowing they can make it up with 5 or 6 other quizzes. Also, we've created a system -- improved just a tad in the last 2 years -- where underachivers can goof most of the quarter, then apply themselves on a ludicrously weighted 9-weeks exam and come out looking pretty dang good.

Or do we have so many grades because parents think we should give their kids more opportunities to succeed, to prove they are B or A students? Is that what giving a lot of grades really does? No.

Is this not partly the reason even somewhat motivated students don't turn in work?

Another reason (I know this is hastily written, but I have a bunch of quizzes to get to) is that they aren't convinced it's worth their time to do it. If we're going to assign it and spend our precious weekends grading it, we have to sell it. We have to explicitly tell them why it isn't busy work and why it helps accomplish the goals of our class and why we think it's good for them.

And if it is busy work? Man! Are you out of your mind? Who has time to grade that stuff?!

So anyway. Once we all work through questions like the ones posed above, then we might be ready to consider overhauling a grading system and it might or might not include a Zero Grade Policy.

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Progress Monitoring: Marzano and Scales

During an in-service on "scales" this afternoon, I soon became lost in a sea of jargon, giving me the opportunity to reflect on what this whole new rigmarole -- and this is just the beginning, we were told -- feels to a teacher of my advanced years.

My ruminations were intermittently interrupted, however, by the anguished cries of my beloved colleagues as they attempted to figure out what exactly the freak "scales" were and why we were having to learn about them.

Sitting in an uncomfortable chair and resting my elbow on a table stacked with the papers my colleagues and I would be dragging home with us afterwards, I had a terrible epiphany.

For the first time in my life, I was relieved to be old. I was grateful that I only had a little time left in a profession that is more and more being orchestrated and overseen by Nutcases United (NU). My gratitude, of course, was tempered by extraordinary sadness and anger at the hijacking of something I hold so dear.

Administrators do their best to calm our fears and dowse our anger by assuring us that this stiflingly disruptive evaluative system -- that seems to be growing tentacles of acronyms -- doesn't change the wonderful way we already teach, it's just a new round of terms to learn.

Nice try. I'm not being sarcastic when I say we appreciate your concern and we understand that you're pretty much as impotent as we are to slow the progress of this Juggernaut.

As the list of indicators grows and the drop-bys increase and the methods of monitoring, measuring, weighing and gauging proliferate, it all becomes more than an overlay of jargon. Let me try a little analogy:

People who have been driving for years eventually train their brains to do all the things required to keep them alive and moving on the road without bothering their conscious minds. We keep an eye on the car ahead of us, and the one ahead of it; we periodically scan the rear- and side-view mirrors; we check our speed limit; we constantly troubleshoot while also pondering elections, football, lesson plans, climate change and Mad Men.

But if we take on a backseat (or passenger seat) driver, someone eager to help us stay safe, we then have to add that person's list of concerns to ours. Our normal, unconscious flow is disrupted as we try to anticipate what our anxious passenger might be seeing. Now, even though we've done it for years, driving is no longer second nature, but strained and anxious.

That's what it's like to try to teach (which is like breathing for someone like me) and to mentally lug around a huge bag full of indicators that must be paid obeisance to. Also, as I have noted here previously, we must act as if there is no extra person in the room tapping away on an iPad. Our community is disrupted, our continuity is disrupted, our rapport is disrupted; the whole prospect of "teaching in the moment" becomes almost impossible while we try to satisfy the needs of the Dark Lord Marzano.

Even if the end product is a good class, it's a fake one on some level.

Okay. Occasionally at today's meeting I tuned back in just enough to get the crap scared out of me chiefly because since I was in about the 7th grade I've been horrible at putting together and sustaining an apparatus such as The Scale. I know this is something I'm just going to have to crib from my colleagues and then feel dirty about it later. Going along with extra stuff that I don't believe in always makes me feel dirty and compromised.

Now about those anguished cries of my beloved colleagues: It was good to hear them. I predict they're just getting warmed up. I work at a school with a terrific faculty, and I sense they have had it up to here with the extra work this crap is handing down to them and, more importantly, with the utter lack of trust it all implies.

Think about it: We have to just keep doing what they say and letting them watch. We have to change the way we talk to our kids. We have to let our kids see us doing things they know we have to do and maybe even watch us do things that go against our teaching philosophy. (I keep expecting one of them to ask, "Don't you have any integrity?") We have to change the way we grade them. We have to add fluff to our plans to meet new demands or try to cram what we already do into newly framed categories. All of this because we can't be trusted to do what we do. All of this because our own profession is not considered safe in our hands.

This all has to stop. Teachers are at the bottom of the food chain, at the bottom of a hole. Someone up on the surface keeps throwing trash on top of us. The people between us and the trash-throwers, people like principals, school board members, and superintendents all seem powerless to stop any of it. While this stuff is falling all around our ears, they keep shrugging and apologizing. They keep saying, "More is coming. This is the direction we're headed so we better get ready for it."

We have become, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut, "listless playthings of enormous forces" beyond our control.

I don't believe in those things. It is people, not forces doing this to us, and they have to stop. Someone has to step up. We have to turn this profession back into something we're not embarrassed to be associated with, something that won't chase our young colleagues away so quickly, something we can once more recommend to our kids as an honorable and rewarding way to spend their adult years.