HS Teachers Aren’t Keeping up on Grading
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Anonymous
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Some teachers just don’t care. There’s a science teacher at my school who is notorious for not grading all quarter. Kids will show up for after school help and we don’t even know what to help them work on. They all openly say he doesn’t teach. I had a coworker in my department years ago who would go weeks not grading and then dump in a bunch of F’s. Yes grading is a lot of work but some teachers really don’t do it at all and there’s not an excuse for that. Grades communicate how the kids are doing in the class, so if they don’t have that basic info, they nor anyone who would be willing to help them has any idea what they need to work on.
-hs teacher |
Anonymous
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They never do
they only grade on the last week of the marking period. |
Anonymous
| The retake policy and minimum formative/summative distribution is what has made grading so much more overwhelming than it used to be, especially for humanities teachers. My partner teaches math and I teach English. The difference in our workload is staggering. |
Anonymous
especially if at the end of the year, admin makes teachers ignore the syllabus and encourage to take work in from all the way back to first quarter. |
Anonymous
Teaching has been invaded by constant streams of data and people in charge who come from a business background. Testing is constant now which means constant date for us to go over. That means tons of data meetings we never used to have. That means a lot less time for lesson prep and grading. Grading is an afterthought that needs to be done in your own time. How can you help? Demand to know how much planning time is taken up by meetings. It’s a lot! I shouldn’t have to call in sick just to get time to grade. Plenty of teachers do it. So if you wonder why your kids’ teachers are out sick a lot, this is one reason why. Also, they send us to a million unnecessary trainings too. In a business, a meeting is part of the job. In teaching, meetings take us away from the job. |
Anonymous
+1. We are required to create common assessments for our SMARTR goal. We spend our meetings deciding on the goal, writing the assessment, deciding when to give the assessment, giving the assessment, grading the assessment, spending a meeting analyzing the assessment, only to turn around several weeks later to give the mid-year assessment and do it all over again. We spend very little time in our meetings actually collaborating to create better instruction because of the admin assessment requirements and figuring out how to meet the summative/formative split requirements. Class sizes have also really impacted my ability to grade. Grading student writing and providing feedback takes time. Going from 25 students in my classes to 30 means an additional 25 students across periods. Assuming 10 minutes of grading per student, those extra students equate to 4 additional hours of grading per assignment I give. |
Anonymous
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MY DD Oceangraphy updated grades last week before that no update since November...
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Anonymous
This. It's hurting students and FCPS is shrugging their shoulders. |
Anonymous
How about the adults in the building act like they care. Come back after that starts happening. |
Anonymous
I used to care more than anyone. Then parents, politicians, central office and building admins and people who don’t even have a tie to schools but hate teachers/public Ed all started screaming at me. Then kids couldn’t be arsed to even take their earbuds out in class or call me something besides “bro” when I speak to them. Then I had more and more side tasks added to my plate while my class sizes increased, so it took longer and longer to do what used to be the basics of the job. And when I prove myself unable to do everything fast enough for everyone’s approval, the same groups started yelling louder. So yeah, I don’t care as much as I did but I retire at the end of this year. Next year, your kid will get someone who never cared and never will and just sticks them on their Chromebook all period. Good luck. |
Anonymous
Who is “they”? I get it. Some teachers don’t grade. Others (like me) give up every weekend so we can catch up on grading. My job consumes every waking moment. It’s all I’ve done today. For those of us sacrificing our own lives for our ever-demanding jobs, it would be nice if you could refrain from dumping us all into the same pot. I used to love teaching, and then the endless demands on my time and sanity began. I have feelers out for another career thanks to the network of teachers who left before me. Those who remain will be the teachers who don’t give up their personal time, so delayed grades will continue to become the norm. |
Anonymous
I used to care a lot, so much. I was there before and after school almost every day. I still care about the kids as individual people but not as much about the teaching because I’m not backed by the parents, counselors or admin. Everyone just wants high grades. No one wants learning. No one wants them to be held accountable for anything. It’s always my fault. They can give any excuses, be disrespectful, not do the work, make deadlines, do the minimum or even show up and I will be told to not even let them make it up but flat out change the grade for them. Because it’s affecting their mental health or some other excuse and it’s my fault. |
Anonymous
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What's changed? 20 years ago, if a kid failed my class everyone acknowledged that was the kid's choice. My job was to present the material, the child's job was to learn it.
Today, if a kid fails my class, it's *my* fault. I have meetings with parents, counselors are asking me what work I can adjust/modify/offer to get kids to pass, admin is asking for documentation of every offered intervention/remediation/retake. I have to have formal remediation sessions with any kid scoring below X, complete with parental notifications, pre and post tests, and a certain number of documented hours working on pre-identified skills, documented in the MTSS tab on SIS. I have to offer extra help to anyone during the remediation block AND after school. (Old days: you'd figure it out at home, or you'd get a tutor, or you just didn't score well) If they are struggling and aren't coming to extra help, I have to communicate with home and track them down with ehallpasses and force them to come. It is no longer my job to present/the child's job to learn. It is the child's job to sit and my job to get them to learn. Old days: Kid fails test. Onwards. Today: Kid fails test. Teacher documents initial score, creates remediation assignment, assigns mandatory extra help session(s) until kid feels confident, documents that extra support to CYA, provides retake opportunity, regrades assessment. Any given week I have 5-10 kids after school working on various unit remediation. Old days: Kid missed 3 classes for vacation, it was unexcused and they failed the quarter. Today: Kid tells me they are missing a week to go to disney, I have to provide a packet of all the missing work. I have to make them video lessons or meet with them after school to make up the work. I am required to accept late work, so I have spent this week pouring through old papers, scrolling through old electronic assignments looking for new submissions, and fielding emails from kids about "I did this assignment from December, can you please grade it now?" 20 years ago we would have said, "Too bad, deadline is passed." I love the kids. I want them to pass. But the responsibility for passing has moved from them to me. (The CT meetings honestly aren't that big a deal to me. It's 2 hours a week, and a good portion of it is valuable for my teams. We break down standards, discuss strategies, split up work load. We work well together. If we didn't meet formally, we'd still meet informally to make sure we were on track with each other.) |
Anonymous
+1 |
Anonymous
+2 |