Changes to grading for all MCPS high school students

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Stop blaming teachers. By HS, students know what they need to do, the just choose not to do it. They think sports is a priority, their phone, their friends, etc., not their school work.

What did we do before parentvue?

Parents need to take responsibility of their kids. Show teachers some respect, then students will learn to respect teachers.

No, not at all. What did we do before parentvue, for one we had clear a syllabus with assignments, test dates, chaper weeks, etc. You knew the expectations vs. now where some teachers make it up week to week.

And? Does your boss lay out the daily agenda a full semester in advance? Maybe, but probably not. More likely you are given general goals and then weekly (or more frequent) updates and directions. And do you have a personal manager helping you keep track of your tasks and scheduling? Probably not. Somehow, you (hopefully) managed to acquire the executive functioning necessary to show up, pay attention, make your own time-management plans and and execute.

So why not give your kid that same opportunity? You can complain when the teacher has no system, and everyone in the class is getting zeros on the assignments nobody was given. Until that happens, you need to take responsibility for teaching your kid how to keep an assignment tracker, how to review said tracker daily to make sure work is getting completed, and how to budget their time so they turn in their work when it's due. These are trainable skills, and it's your job as the parent to train your kid. Your teacher is providing the practice area, not the handholding.

[Anonymous]

I guess PP never had a kid miss days of school dues to illness.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How about a rule where teachers and admin need to respond to parents within three days. We have teachers and admin who clearly read the messages and don’t respond. How about teachers needing to consistently post assignments online so parents know what’s going on. How about teachers grade within a week so kids know how they are doing? We have teachers who still have not graded or posted in a month. Not ok. Kids can only be successful if teachers also put in the effort.

Most teachers are putting in the effort. But that effort requires time. We’ve done this math multiple times but here it is again:
150 students x 5min an assignment =750mins / 60mins in an hour = 12.5 hours . Thats the total time to grade one assignment. If a teacher got one class period free per day let’s say 47mins x 5 days =235 mins /60 =3.9 hours. That’s how much time they had in their work week to potentially grade. There other 8.6 hours comes from their personal life.

Out of seven teachers, three are putting in effort. Getting a month behind on grading and not responding to parents is not ok.

Thank those three. They gave up their weekends and evenings for you.

The other four are giving you what they are paid for.

Some, yes, some no. It’s their job. Not ok to not grade. As of today still no grades posted for the past month.

I’m a DP, but I’m happy to repeat the math for you:

I have 150 students. A writing assignment can take 15 minutes to grade. That’s 37.5 hours of grading. I get approximately 3.5 hours a week of time to get my work done.

And that’s just one assignment. Just one. That doesn’t include emails I need to respond to, reports I have to update, plans I have to revise.

So literally half my job has to be done on my own time. Over 30 hours a week.

So… SHOULD this be my job?

How do you think your students will improve without written feedback? I get that it takes time, but isn’t this a huge part of learning and the job?

I am a middle school teacher. My students do not read the feedback. They look at their grade and come up to me and say 'why did I get a B/C?' I ask them about looking at the feedback and they say nope.

Out of curiosity, can the parents see the feedback? One thing I find frustrating is that as a parent I can rarely see the feedback. Otherwise I would go over it with my kid. “the teacher says you need a better into sentence. Can you think of a good into sentence for this paragraph?” Etc. I do think it’s hard for 11-13 year olds to look at written feedback and internalize it. I work with 25-30 hear olds and I am often told they want oral feedback, not just my written feedback on their work product. I get ghat teachers don’t have time to sit down with every kid but I feel like there is missed opposition for parents to partner with teachers in this effort.

I receive that feeeback in the work place too - don’t just send written comments. Make appointments to sit and go through the document to explain the reasons for high and low level changes. Personally I didn’t post it earlier because it’s clear the teachers posting here don’t care about such things or don’t want to spend the time.

I’m one of the teachers posting here. I work about 70 hours a week, primarily because of my grading load. That’s what it takes to provide feedback in a timely manner. As I said earlier: I am the teacher you want. Being that teacher is burning me out.

Here’s what I do:
1. Give up my nights and weekends to grade
2. Give written feedback within two weeks. I can’t do earlier because, as I said, one assignment can take me almost 40 hours to grade.
3. Provide class time for students to read my comments. They must comment back AND provide revisions. This goes home for review and comes back to me within 2 days.
4. I review their revisions (another 10 hours of grading) returned within 3 days.
5. The process starts again with the next writing assignment. The portfolio builds.

This is what everybody here is asking for. It’s me doing the job as it should be done.

I’m not given ANY time to do this, so it comes from my family. No, that’s not okay. It’s why teachers start phoning it in. Our job should not be in direct competition with our health and our own lives.

I want to thank you for this but can you tell me if you share that feedback with parents? If not, is there a reason why? I genuinely want to help the teachers help my kids — I spent several hours a week myself on parentvue and canvass trying to figure out what I can see, but it’s actually very little. When I was a kid I have paper assignments and books and graded papers that my parents could review with me. I feel like part of the problem is that the current systems discourage parents from being involved in their kids education, which is probably to the detriment of both the kids and the teachers.

I teach advanced high school courses. I firmly believe students must be their own advocates, so I do not involve parents every step of the way. My students must be prepared for college coursework in 1-2 years, and parents will have no access to professors then.

I explain my writing tasks and the progression at the start of the year; this information is in all of my course documentation. Essays, which are hand written in class, are announced a week ahead of time in class and online. I include links to any prep materials. The essays, with comments, can go home for two days for reflection and revision. At that point, I want them back in the classroom so I can rescore and then they can be added to individual portfolios.

Parents have access to the calendar and prep materials. They can see the comments when the essays go home for revision.

But, by junior year, I do not directly involve parents. If a parent wants to meet with me, which occasionally happens, I absolutely welcome that and we can review the student’s work together. I’m available before or after school every day.

Kids sometimes have reasons why they will not approach teachers and someone still need support. As a parent if my kid needs me to step in I will. Handwriting essays is terrible.

Why? wrist deformity? Terrible, you say... Really? Didn't you do this as a kid and survive? God forbid your kid have to log off and actually focus on an on-paper task without eleventy digital distractions. Sorry for your not-loss; your kid's gonna be okay.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I guess PP never had a kid miss days of school dues to illness.

I guess your kid has no friends and can't figure out how to ask them for notes? The assignments are typically online. If you need papers, ask. Teach your kid to advocate for themselves. This is a pathetic excuse.

And yes, my kids have missed school. They figured this out. Yours can too.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:At least at my child’s high school, lunch for the teachers is not considered a planning time. There is close to an hour for students and of that 30 minutes is available for students to go into any teachers and get help or use their extended time accommodation. There were years when my daughter would spend almost every day with her math teacher, as she would really struggled with that. Another year, my son spent a lot of time with his English teacher because he needed extra help with his writing and really strives to do his best. I was actually always really impressed with how willing teachers were to spend time with them.

Is it not like this at all schools? One child graduated this year and my other child last year so this is all very recent information.

Not in MCPS.

That’s the case at WJ. It’s not great for either teachers or kids because the kids don’t get to eat lunch if they missed school due to illness -/ lunch is used to make up missed assignments.

It's like this at Einstein as well.

At Einstein, it depends on the teacher. We've only had a few teachers available at lunch. They often have a free day in class and that's when they do the make up or weeks later. We've only had a few that are willing to provide help at lunch. Most refuse.

Listen... your bratty little kid needs to turn their work in on time. The teacher did their job: your kid got taught, got the assignment, got the deadline. If they blew it, tough. This BS about how teachers need to spend their lunch breaks giving your gobshite kid twelve extra chances to do their work is absolute nonsense, and I say this as someone whose kid spent the better part of this past semester being exactly this sort of flaky, slacking gobshite. I let them get the grades they deserved. They learned.

Actions have consequences. If you blow off your duties at your job, do you expect your boss to give up their lunch break to accommodate make ups? Of course not! That would be absurd. Which is why it's equally absurd that we're giving highschoolers a false sense of security in their slacking. Do the work the right way, the first time, and there's no trouble.

And if you're talking about "help" needed to actually do the work, maybe your kid needs to drop down a level, or get a tutor, or both. Again, not the teacher's job to make sure your kid is prepared and supported. That's our job as the parents. Discipline and support structures are PARENT responsibilities, so quit shifting them to the already-overburdened teachers.

If someone at work is having trouble with the assignment, I expect them to
reach out for help. I expect the person who was solicited to make time and with them. I hate when people make half analogies. If you are going to compare school to work, then follow through.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I guess PP never had a kid miss days of school dues to illness.

I guess your kid has no friends and can't figure out how to ask them for notes? The assignments are typically online. If you need papers, ask. Teach your kid to advocate for themselves. This is a pathetic excuse.

And yes, my kids have missed school. They figured this out. Yours can too.

I guess your kids’ classes are so easy they didn’t need to be taught a lesson. I guess you don’t need a teacher at all.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I guess PP never had a kid miss days of school dues to illness.

I guess your kid has no friends and can't figure out how to ask them for notes? The assignments are typically online. If you need papers, ask. Teach your kid to advocate for themselves. This is a pathetic excuse.

And yes, my kids have missed school. They figured this out. Yours can too.

Yes, mine have, and the process for doing so was meeting with the teacher during lunch or before school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I guess PP never had a kid miss days of school dues to illness.

I guess your kid has no friends and can't figure out how to ask them for notes? The assignments are typically online. If you need papers, ask. Teach your kid to advocate for themselves. This is a pathetic excuse.

And yes, my kids have missed school. They figured this out. Yours can too.

I guess your kids’ classes are so easy they didn’t need to be taught a lesson. I guess you don’t need a teacher at all.

My kids are straight A students in APs, but go off. They got taught their lessons. They showed up, paid attention, and got the education they expected. And when they were sick, they called friends, got notes, got on Khan Academy or other sites and got caught up. This isn't hard.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I guess PP never had a kid miss days of school dues to illness.

I guess your kid has no friends and can't figure out how to ask them for notes? The assignments are typically online. If you need papers, ask. Teach your kid to advocate for themselves. This is a pathetic excuse.

And yes, my kids have missed school. They figured this out. Yours can too.

Yes, mine have, and the process for doing so was meeting with the teacher during lunch or before school.

You realize we're not talking about all your kids missing class for legitimate reasons here, right? You do realize that most of the wankers whinging on this thread about "why won't the teachers give up more of their time?!" have jerk kids who slack in class and then expect extra attention so they can get a padded grade they didn't earn.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:At least at my child’s high school, lunch for the teachers is not considered a planning time. There is close to an hour for students and of that 30 minutes is available for students to go into any teachers and get help or use their extended time accommodation. There were years when my daughter would spend almost every day with her math teacher, as she would really struggled with that. Another year, my son spent a lot of time with his English teacher because he needed extra help with his writing and really strives to do his best. I was actually always really impressed with how willing teachers were to spend time with them.

Is it not like this at all schools? One child graduated this year and my other child last year so this is all very recent information.

Not in MCPS.

That’s the case at WJ. It’s not great for either teachers or kids because the kids don’t get to eat lunch if they missed school due to illness -/ lunch is used to make up missed assignments.

It's like this at Einstein as well.

At Einstein, it depends on the teacher. We've only had a few teachers available at lunch. They often have a free day in class and that's when they do the make up or weeks later. We've only had a few that are willing to provide help at lunch. Most refuse.

Listen... your bratty little kid needs to turn their work in on time. The teacher did their job: your kid got taught, got the assignment, got the deadline. If they blew it, tough. This BS about how teachers need to spend their lunch breaks giving your gobshite kid twelve extra chances to do their work is absolute nonsense, and I say this as someone whose kid spent the better part of this past semester being exactly this sort of flaky, slacking gobshite. I let them get the grades they deserved. They learned.

Actions have consequences. If you blow off your duties at your job, do you expect your boss to give up their lunch break to accommodate make ups? Of course not! That would be absurd. Which is why it's equally absurd that we're giving highschoolers a false sense of security in their slacking. Do the work the right way, the first time, and there's no trouble.

And if you're talking about "help" needed to actually do the work, maybe your kid needs to drop down a level, or get a tutor, or both. Again, not the teacher's job to make sure your kid is prepared and supported. That's our job as the parents. Discipline and support structures are PARENT responsibilities, so quit shifting them to the already-overburdened teachers.

If someone at work is having trouble with the assignment, I expect them to
reach out for help. I expect the person who was solicited to make time and with them. I hate when people make half analogies. If you are going to compare school to work, then follow through.

A peer, sure. But even that only goes so far. And if it's an occasional and reciprocal "hey, I was out. can you help me get caught up?" that's very different from knowing that Stacy was online, shopping all day, and Steve comes in hungover and unprepared for the job he probably padded his resume to get, and being expected to make time to help them do what they could've and should've done for themselves.

Since you needed it spelled out for you...

[Anonymous]

Look, I don’t know if I just got lucky, but both my kids had excellent teachers who were always willing to help out the motivated students. Both my kids had fantastic relationships with many of their teachers and I am so appreciative of all of their hard work and dedication.

But I don’t blame the teachers for being super frustrated at all for the ridiculous pressures they are put under with the barely there students. If students don’t show up, they should fail. PPW’s can help with the reasoning, but teachers should focus on teaching.

I think the new grading standards will help with this.

But clearly, parents also need to have reasonable demands. A child asking for help during lunch and being told no is not okay. On the other hand, a parent demanding that THEY have full access to all notes so that they can “help” their child succeed- not reasonable.

Let’s look for the positives of the new grading system and not look for things to complain about (not getting into colleges, lower scholarships), before they materialize.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How about a rule where teachers and admin need to respond to parents within three days. We have teachers and admin who clearly read the messages and don’t respond. How about teachers needing to consistently post assignments online so parents know what’s going on. How about teachers grade within a week so kids know how they are doing? We have teachers who still have not graded or posted in a month. Not ok. Kids can only be successful if teachers also put in the effort.

Most teachers are putting in the effort. But that effort requires time. We’ve done this math multiple times but here it is again:
150 students x 5min an assignment =750mins / 60mins in an hour = 12.5 hours . Thats the total time to grade one assignment. If a teacher got one class period free per day let’s say 47mins x 5 days =235 mins /60 =3.9 hours. That’s how much time they had in their work week to potentially grade. There other 8.6 hours comes from their personal life.

Out of seven teachers, three are putting in effort. Getting a month behind on grading and not responding to parents is not ok.

Thank those three. They gave up their weekends and evenings for you.

The other four are giving you what they are paid for.

Some, yes, some no. It’s their job. Not ok to not grade. As of today still no grades posted for the past month.

I’m a DP, but I’m happy to repeat the math for you:

I have 150 students. A writing assignment can take 15 minutes to grade. That’s 37.5 hours of grading. I get approximately 3.5 hours a week of time to get my work done.

And that’s just one assignment. Just one. That doesn’t include emails I need to respond to, reports I have to update, plans I have to revise.

So literally half my job has to be done on my own time. Over 30 hours a week.

So… SHOULD this be my job?

How do you think your students will improve without written feedback? I get that it takes time, but isn’t this a huge part of learning and the job?

I am a middle school teacher. My students do not read the feedback. They look at their grade and come up to me and say 'why did I get a B/C?' I ask them about looking at the feedback and they say nope.

Out of curiosity, can the parents see the feedback? One thing I find frustrating is that as a parent I can rarely see the feedback. Otherwise I would go over it with my kid. “the teacher says you need a better into sentence. Can you think of a good into sentence for this paragraph?” Etc. I do think it’s hard for 11-13 year olds to look at written feedback and internalize it. I work with 25-30 hear olds and I am often told they want oral feedback, not just my written feedback on their work product. I get ghat teachers don’t have time to sit down with every kid but I feel like there is missed opposition for parents to partner with teachers in this effort.

I receive that feeeback in the work place too - don’t just send written comments. Make appointments to sit and go through the document to explain the reasons for high and low level changes. Personally I didn’t post it earlier because it’s clear the teachers posting here don’t care about such things or don’t want to spend the time.

I’m one of the teachers posting here. I work about 70 hours a week, primarily because of my grading load. That’s what it takes to provide feedback in a timely manner. As I said earlier: I am the teacher you want. Being that teacher is burning me out.

Here’s what I do:
1. Give up my nights and weekends to grade
2. Give written feedback within two weeks. I can’t do earlier because, as I said, one assignment can take me almost 40 hours to grade.
3. Provide class time for students to read my comments. They must comment back AND provide revisions. This goes home for review and comes back to me within 2 days.
4. I review their revisions (another 10 hours of grading) returned within 3 days.
5. The process starts again with the next writing assignment. The portfolio builds.

This is what everybody here is asking for. It’s me doing the job as it should be done.

I’m not given ANY time to do this, so it comes from my family. No, that’s not okay. It’s why teachers start phoning it in. Our job should not be in direct competition with our health and our own lives.

I want to thank you for this but can you tell me if you share that feedback with parents? If not, is there a reason why? I genuinely want to help the teachers help my kids — I spent several hours a week myself on parentvue and canvass trying to figure out what I can see, but it’s actually very little. When I was a kid I have paper assignments and books and graded papers that my parents could review with me. I feel like part of the problem is that the current systems discourage parents from being involved in their kids education, which is probably to the detriment of both the kids and the teachers.

I teach advanced high school courses. I firmly believe students must be their own advocates, so I do not involve parents every step of the way. My students must be prepared for college coursework in 1-2 years, and parents will have no access to professors then.

I explain my writing tasks and the progression at the start of the year; this information is in all of my course documentation. Essays, which are hand written in class, are announced a week ahead of time in class and online. I include links to any prep materials. The essays, with comments, can go home for two days for reflection and revision. At that point, I want them back in the classroom so I can rescore and then they can be added to individual portfolios.

Parents have access to the calendar and prep materials. They can see the comments when the essays go home for revision.

But, by junior year, I do not directly involve parents. If a parent wants to meet with me, which occasionally happens, I absolutely welcome that and we can review the student’s work together. I’m available before or after school every day.

Kids sometimes have reasons why they will not approach teachers and someone still need support. As a parent if my kid needs me to step in I will. Handwriting essays is terrible.

Why? wrist deformity? Terrible, you say... Really? Didn't you do this as a kid and survive? God forbid your kid have to log off and actually focus on an on-paper task without eleventy digital distractions. Sorry for your not-loss; your kid's gonna be okay.

My kid's English teacher has the students handwriting essays more frequently because their plagiarism detecting tools aren't working well enough on the kids' AI generated essays. They say it's night and day between the type of essays they produce under pressure with no Internet tools to help them. That's not a bad thing to see what kids are capable of.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How about a rule where teachers and admin need to respond to parents within three days. We have teachers and admin who clearly read the messages and don’t respond. How about teachers needing to consistently post assignments online so parents know what’s going on. How about teachers grade within a week so kids know how they are doing? We have teachers who still have not graded or posted in a month. Not ok. Kids can only be successful if teachers also put in the effort.

Most teachers are putting in the effort. But that effort requires time. We’ve done this math multiple times but here it is again:
150 students x 5min an assignment =750mins / 60mins in an hour = 12.5 hours . Thats the total time to grade one assignment. If a teacher got one class period free per day let’s say 47mins x 5 days =235 mins /60 =3.9 hours. That’s how much time they had in their work week to potentially grade. There other 8.6 hours comes from their personal life.

Out of seven teachers, three are putting in effort. Getting a month behind on grading and not responding to parents is not ok.

Thank those three. They gave up their weekends and evenings for you.

The other four are giving you what they are paid for.

Some, yes, some no. It’s their job. Not ok to not grade. As of today still no grades posted for the past month.

I’m a DP, but I’m happy to repeat the math for you:

I have 150 students. A writing assignment can take 15 minutes to grade. That’s 37.5 hours of grading. I get approximately 3.5 hours a week of time to get my work done.

And that’s just one assignment. Just one. That doesn’t include emails I need to respond to, reports I have to update, plans I have to revise.

So literally half my job has to be done on my own time. Over 30 hours a week.

So… SHOULD this be my job?

How do you think your students will improve without written feedback? I get that it takes time, but isn’t this a huge part of learning and the job?

I am a middle school teacher. My students do not read the feedback. They look at their grade and come up to me and say 'why did I get a B/C?' I ask them about looking at the feedback and they say nope.

As parents, we are going in and reading it. And, if that many kids are struggling, maybe you need to take some more time to reinforce the concepts they are struggling with.

Yep, keep blaming the teacher. At what point does the student have any accountability.

“Please read my feedback and if you have additional questions, we can meet at x time.”

The teacher mentioned middle schoolers. She needs to train them in the way she wants to behave. You get tweens to be accountable by telling and holding them what the standards are.

I know that it is difficult to believe, so I will ask it again, what time during the day do I have to meet with 150 middle schoolers to go over their feedback? I don't have office hours. If I am not teaching a class, I am in a meeting or planning or grading. If I open up time to meet individually with students, what should I not do? Plan or grade? Oh, you want me to be like the PP who works 70 hours a week. I am not going to do that. And you can continue to assume that I am a bad teacher, but this is a job. Until MCPS can give me the appropriate time to do my job, things won't get done. The only reason the public school system is not failing is because teachers are giving up their lives to hold it together. And for what? For parents to still not value what we do. I will say it again. Please fight for teachers to have the time to implement this new grading policy with fidelity. Demand MCPS gives us time to do this.

If the idea that you would meet with a kid before school, at lunch, or after school is so unfathomable to you, you are worse than I thought. My children are in high school and fortunately we have yet to encounter a teacher who is so extreme.

DP here.

I’m genuinely curious. How do you think the teacher above is going to meet with 150 students individually?

Let’s say she meets with 2 students before school each day, 2 at her lunch, and 3 after school. That’s 7 a day she can meet with if she gives up any and all available time she has. (And that’s assuming that time wasn’t already taken up by other requirements.) She can meet with 35 students a week. It’ll take her 5 weeks to meet with all 150 and that’s by giving up ALL the time she has.

Did you think this through, PP?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Stop blaming teachers. By HS, students know what they need to do, the just choose not to do it. They think sports is a priority, their phone, their friends, etc., not their school work.

What did we do before parentvue?

Parents need to take responsibility of their kids. Show teachers some respect, then students will learn to respect teachers.

No, not at all. What did we do before parentvue, for one we had clear a syllabus with assignments, test dates, chaper weeks, etc. You knew the expectations vs. now where some teachers make it up week to week.

And? Does your boss lay out the daily agenda a full semester in advance? Maybe, but probably not. More likely you are given general goals and then weekly (or more frequent) updates and directions. And do you have a personal manager helping you keep track of your tasks and scheduling? Probably not. Somehow, you (hopefully) managed to acquire the executive functioning necessary to show up, pay attention, make your own time-management plans and and execute.

So why not give your kid that same opportunity? You can complain when the teacher has no system, and everyone in the class is getting zeros on the assignments nobody was given. Until that happens, you need to take responsibility for teaching your kid how to keep an assignment tracker, how to review said tracker daily to make sure work is getting completed, and how to budget their time so they turn in their work when it's due. These are trainable skills, and it's your job as the parent to train your kid. Your teacher is providing the practice area, not the handholding.

This isn't a job but most jobs you know your role. Teachers are all over the place with assignments. Mine check multiple times a day as do we. A professional would have a clear outline of their class.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How about a rule where teachers and admin need to respond to parents within three days. We have teachers and admin who clearly read the messages and don’t respond. How about teachers needing to consistently post assignments online so parents know what’s going on. How about teachers grade within a week so kids know how they are doing? We have teachers who still have not graded or posted in a month. Not ok. Kids can only be successful if teachers also put in the effort.

Most teachers are putting in the effort. But that effort requires time. We’ve done this math multiple times but here it is again:
150 students x 5min an assignment =750mins / 60mins in an hour = 12.5 hours . Thats the total time to grade one assignment. If a teacher got one class period free per day let’s say 47mins x 5 days =235 mins /60 =3.9 hours. That’s how much time they had in their work week to potentially grade. There other 8.6 hours comes from their personal life.

Out of seven teachers, three are putting in effort. Getting a month behind on grading and not responding to parents is not ok.

Thank those three. They gave up their weekends and evenings for you.

The other four are giving you what they are paid for.

Some, yes, some no. It’s their job. Not ok to not grade. As of today still no grades posted for the past month.

I’m a DP, but I’m happy to repeat the math for you:

I have 150 students. A writing assignment can take 15 minutes to grade. That’s 37.5 hours of grading. I get approximately 3.5 hours a week of time to get my work done.

And that’s just one assignment. Just one. That doesn’t include emails I need to respond to, reports I have to update, plans I have to revise.

So literally half my job has to be done on my own time. Over 30 hours a week.

So… SHOULD this be my job?

How do you think your students will improve without written feedback? I get that it takes time, but isn’t this a huge part of learning and the job?

I am a middle school teacher. My students do not read the feedback. They look at their grade and come up to me and say 'why did I get a B/C?' I ask them about looking at the feedback and they say nope.

As parents, we are going in and reading it. And, if that many kids are struggling, maybe you need to take some more time to reinforce the concepts they are struggling with.

Yep, keep blaming the teacher. At what point does the student have any accountability.

“Please read my feedback and if you have additional questions, we can meet at x time.”

The teacher mentioned middle schoolers. She needs to train them in the way she wants to behave. You get tweens to be accountable by telling and holding them what the standards are.

I know that it is difficult to believe, so I will ask it again, what time during the day do I have to meet with 150 middle schoolers to go over their feedback? I don't have office hours. If I am not teaching a class, I am in a meeting or planning or grading. If I open up time to meet individually with students, what should I not do? Plan or grade? Oh, you want me to be like the PP who works 70 hours a week. I am not going to do that. And you can continue to assume that I am a bad teacher, but this is a job. Until MCPS can give me the appropriate time to do my job, things won't get done. The only reason the public school system is not failing is because teachers are giving up their lives to hold it together. And for what? For parents to still not value what we do. I will say it again. Please fight for teachers to have the time to implement this new grading policy with fidelity. Demand MCPS gives us time to do this.

If the idea that you would meet with a kid before school, at lunch, or after school is so unfathomable to you, you are worse than I thought. My children are in high school and fortunately we have yet to encounter a teacher who is so extreme.

DP here.

I’m genuinely curious. How do you think the teacher above is going to meet with 150 students individually?

Let’s say she meets with 2 students before school each day, 2 at her lunch, and 3 after school. That’s 7 a day she can meet with if she gives up any and all available time she has. (And that’s assuming that time wasn’t already taken up by other requirements.) She can meet with 35 students a week. It’ll take her 5 weeks to meet with all 150 and that’s by giving up ALL the time she has.

Did you think this through, PP?

None of our teachers meet before or after school.