Reply to Changes to grading for all MCPS high school students

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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. [/quote]

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.[/quote]

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

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

The other four are giving you what they are paid for.[/quote]

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

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?

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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?[/quote]

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.  [/quote]

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.[/quote]

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. [/quote]

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. 
[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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. [/quote]

This is great.  My kid is going into his junior  year and I’ve never seen comments come back on essays.  I would definitely review them with him so that he could have more opportunity to grow in his writing.  Thank you for doing that.  
I think the college analogy is somewhat stretched though.  In a typical McPS schedule a kid might have 20 assignments due on a week.  That just never happens in college.  It’s a lot to keep track of — for kids whose frontal lobes are much less developed than college kids.  My kid got a C this wuarter because he missed one assignment in a class — got as on everything he turned in but just missed one thing and got a zero.  That kind of thing doesn’t happen in college because yo don’t have constant turn-in dates.  I’d love a system where it’s easier to track what it coming up and what has been turned in.  With the current systems, you often don’t see that something wasn’t turned in until a month later when the grade posts.  And many teachers don’t post the calendar due dates until a couple days before. [/quote]

I guess part of the problem is that parental expectations are different now. I have HSers and I am very glad we’ve moved to a world where the teacher puts the burden on them and not me. At BTSN, in every class for my junior, the teacher gave some version of what the teacher above posted, and I appreciated it.  It was not as overt until 11th grade.

Do you not see the zeros/upcoming assignments in ParentVue?
[/quote]

Yes, we see then zeros.

Zeros for cancelled assignments.

Zeros for incorrectly scheduled assignments.

Zeros for assignments submitted a month ago that haven’t been graded yet.

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