Reply to HS teacher not grading papers for two straight semesters. Does FCPS have a policy on this?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I’m a teacher. Your kid’s teacher is lazy and that’s unfortunate. Grading truly sucks and grading writing is time consuming and to provide feedback even more so. That being said, it’s part of the job so unacceptable not to do it. Unfortunately, many of the district policies have created a sense of “why try” among kids and staff. Staff know the kids have to pass no matter what, so do the kids. The result is this sense of “I can give hours and hours to grading and doing work or just pass them all anyway.” And on the kids end it looks like “they’re going to have to pass me anyway so why do the work.” We have a LOT of bad policies that have completely demotivated all stakeholders because the districts just want to cook their data. It sucks. [/quote]

That is absolute BS.  I don’t teach HS anymore but when I did, I worked 60/70 hour weeks.  I was NOT lazy.  But sometimes I didn’t have an extra 10 hours in the week to grade a set of written responses.  The teacher is not (necessarily) lazy.  It’s an impossible workload.  And frankly, VERY few students pay any attention to feedback in their writing.  If I have to prioritize, I focus on planning engaging lessons and activities, but marking up writing that most students don’t care about.[/quote]

It’s not BS. I do teach HS, and I teach writing. Having NO grades is unacceptable, as much as I hate grading too: you have to have grades. There are ways to reduce the time it takes to give feedback: chunk the writing, only give feedback for one specific element of the writing, do group revisions, etc, but you have to find a way to do it somehow and provide grades. I am not saying grade on the weekends (I don’t.) I’m saying no teacher should accept that having no grades in the gradebook is ok. If a teacher is teaching AP, they agreed to teach a higher level course that is writing heavy and dependent on preparing kids for a writing test. You need to be willing to do that if you CHOOSE to take on an AP course.

I try to manage my time by grading the kids’ writing and then offering the ones who want feedback to schedule a writing conference with me. This way I can truly focus on providing individual feedback to the kids who really want it and will use it instead of spending 10 hours giving it to everyone when all but maybe 5 will never even look at it or use it. So everyone gets a grade, the ones who truly want detailed feedback get it, and my time is spent in more effective ways. [/quote]

Thank you for a reasonable explanation of how to handle a classroom and grade and being a reasonable teacher. No one wants teachers overloaded but at the same time don’t want to hear about them justifying not doing their job and being told to suck it up. Your ideas sound great and are what I’ve seen reasonable teachers implement. Keep up the great work and thank you for teaching students without taking out frustrations on children or parents. Will continue to advocate for reasonable work and class sizes for teachers that include grading. [/quote]

Round of applause for this teacher (above)![/quote]

I'm not a teacer and the same poster who another teacher said she was sick to listen to. I'm sorry that teacher is irate at her situation, but she's just taking it out on the wrong people. As shown above reasonable teachers do exist and they get praise. It might be more at the poolside where parents are talking about great teachers or one on one to their face and not here where you can't name names, but it does exist.[/quote]

No one wants your crappy praise they want to see it in their paycheck and they don't so save it.[/quote]

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