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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I’m a principal. I spent most of December giving gifts, having fun events, visiting with teachers and doing everything possible to show the love. Basically it was a please-don’t-quit-over-break campaign. It’s a hard time to be a teacher.

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Please tell your higher ups to [b]get rid of both the minimum 50% policy[/b] and of open enrollment. My entire department is besides themselves about the 50%. I'm really tired of being expected to get students to pass SOLs and AP tests and being told at the same time that I have to "meet students where they're at."  That sometimes means they're two or more years behind. We're passing kids who know next to nothing by inflating their grades with the 50% and they pay for it later.
 About open enrollment, if you're worried about racists preventing a student from going into a class they deserve to be in, there's a simple and fair solution: a blind placement test. Students are assigned an identifier that corresponds to their ID number and is stored in a centralized database with no other identifiers of any kind and not accessible outside of Gatehouse.[/quote]

You lost me on the 50% policy. The impact of a zero on a class average is inappropriate. Students should be graded on what they do in class. If they get a 30% on work done in class, then so be it. But a zero for not turning in some homework? No.  Even worse are those teachers that don’t take late work. Late work should be accepted with a deduction. When they don’t, that’s where you lose me.

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If they get a 30% on work done in class, we STILL HAVE TO PUT IN A 50%. We have students scoring 0, 10 and 20% on assessments or not doing them at all. We still have to put in a 50%.

I am talking about in-class work and it's not one zero. Our homework counts for so little in the total grade that it's not going to make a noticeable difference--maybe half a grade at most by the end of the year.

It's easy to see that you can get higher grades on earlier (and in STEM classes, easier) work and then gradually do less and less to the point where you're (for instance) not learning anything during second semester. And still pass. Just put some numbers in a spreadsheet and you'll see.  And then we end up with these students in the next level and they know next to nothing.

As far as late work goes, in math, doing homework late means you're not prepared for the next class (okay, sure, one or two students can manage without doing homework--they're not the ones I'm talking about). We still give them partial credit if they turn it in by the test date, but by then they've already shot themselves in the foot. And turning it in after the test is just a joke.

The other problem with late work is that students wait to see their friends' grades to find out what was on the assignment and how it was graded and then they adjust their work accordingly or copy. Totally unfair to the kid who turned it in on time and got a C for a kid who knows nothing and turns it in late to get a B after the late deduction.
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