Report Cards

I look back on my daily reflections for this week and they are all written in red pen because that was my life this week. Marking. Endless marking. I can easily say that this was my most frustrating week, both on the teaching end of things as well as the background noise. I challenged my students with activities they had never done before and they met my expectations. It was fantastic. The frustration came in when I turned to my marking, gave them feedback and the number of students who wanted to settle with the bare minimum, not take my suggestions and fix their work for a better grade. I need to think of a new incentive system over Spring Break as this is part of my teaching philosophy; student based learning. I have a lot of faith in this group of kids, I know they will be malleable and rise to the challenges I give them.

The other source of frustration this week was realizing that my TM and I had not communicated clearly the expectations we had for one another when it comes to assessment. I had done exactly what my professors had said; plan the units, explain the units (assessments included), get feedback, make changes and start teaching. All of that went reasonably well yet when it came to start inputting marks for report cards, my mentor was expecting more assessments. I was flustered as I did have several assessment FOR’s all finished but I thought she was aware that the majority of my big assessment OF’s wouldn’t be until the week before spring break, too late for the Term 2 report cards. To be flexible, I turned some of the assessment FOR’s into OF’s for the sake of marks but my mentor was expecting more. By the end of the week, on our design and assessment day, we figured it all out and are on somewhat on the same page but it shouldn’t have been needed as we should have communicated the expectations clearer to each other.

The report card process itself has been interesting. The program that my mentor uses is amazing and very user friendly. You input all the marks by subject and can weigh the participation, assignments, projects and tests all however you want and the program does all the math for you. The other really helpful thing is you input all of the comments into a comment bank with prompts such as “Fname” and “he/she” and when you click to add that particular comment to a particular student, it inserts their name automatically. At first I thought that this was lazy and it didn’t allow for the comments to be personalized or fitting to a particular student but as you add them in, it still allows you to review and change as you go, making it flow. I understand now why my mentor wanted me to do all 90 students as it does make sense using the program. On our design and assessment day, we sat down and wrote about 8 general comments together and discussed which students would need more specific ones. I still have to do a lot more work on my own, more than I think I am expected to do in the eyes of the university, but I am now feeling a lot more supported by my TM in this and have accepted it.

Next week is going to fly by. Monday is the absolute last day for students to hand in missing assignments, finish rehearsing their speeches and Wednesday-Friday is assessing the speeches. I have also began organizing a school wide spirit day for St. Patrick’s day. It is not taking a lot of planning on my part, just talking to the right teachers in regards to the student council and leadership teams to then promote it from there. It will be a nice way to end the week before spring break and gives me more evidence for goal 14, school culture and community.