Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I hear what you are saying about being able to see what your child is, or is not doing well. But, I find that the vast majority of work does not come home. Yes, if there were a p on a spelling test where dc missed 5 words, I would know that his work isn't great and that we'd want to work in that. What about all the unseen work? What about seeing a lot of Ps on a report card and wondering what they mean?

I hear you, you need to ask the teacher for more of the work to be sent home. We get all the past week work on Thursday's along with the weekly assessment. I also get to see the reading notebook. But, I still ask -- If the report card was all A's or B's and you didn't see the work would you not be in the same position? If you know that A means 90% of work is understood, it would still be 90% of unknown work if you are never seeing the work. Make sense??

Not PP. However, I found that your analogy was not quite on the track with PP.

1) While you keeps comparing P to A, many parents feel that P could be (A and B) or (A and B and C). Consequently, there is no enough resolution for parents and students to see whether there is any problem/gap. "Hey, this kid got proficiency and great!" is not the same as "Well, this kid got B/C and maybe, he can move to B/A if doing such and such."

2) You were saying that parents need to ask teacher things like this and that. This is equivalent to say that the system is incomplete and there is a back door to do this and that at the anecdotal level. Apparently, you are an experience person and know how to open up doors. Please not get me wrong. You should be very proud of this capability. However, you may recognize that it is quite hard for any other parent to do the same. How about socially and financially incapable parents? What can they do?

In fact, after reading into your message, I am thinking that your points really imply the opposite of your main opinion.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I hear what you are saying about being able to see what your child is, or is not doing well. But, I find that the vast majority of work does not come home. Yes, if there were a p on a spelling test where dc missed 5 words, I would know that his work isn't great and that we'd want to work in that. What about all the unseen work? What about seeing a lot of Ps on a report card and wondering what they mean?

I hear you, you need to ask the teacher for more of the work to be sent home. We get all the past week work on Thursday's along with the weekly assessment. I also get to see the reading notebook. But, I still ask -- If the report card was all A's or B's and you didn't see the work would you not be in the same position? If you know that A means 90% of work is understood, it would still be 90% of unknown work if you are never seeing the work. Make sense??

Anonymous wrote:I hear what you are saying about being able to see what your child is, or is not doing well. But, I find that the vast majority of work does not come home. Yes, if there were a p on a spelling test where dc missed 5 words, I would know that his work isn't great and that we'd want to work in that. What about all the unseen work? What about seeing a lot of Ps on a report card and wondering what they mean?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The "difference" is that aiming for an A is aiming for excellence and the best outcome. Aiming for a P is aiming for some I'll-defined idea of "what a child in this grade should be able to do." that isn't about individual excellence it is about generic county wide standards.

Why do you think that the standards are ill-defined? They're quite well-defined, as far as I can tell. MCPS publishes them. You can look them up.

And if you think that an A necessarily means individual excellence, well...

There are a lot of parents who would disagree with you that the standards are "quite well-defined.". Plenty of times, an assignment doesn't "qualify" for the possibility if ES. Other times, even the teacher will not be able to articulate what would be required to earn an ES. For many of us, we simply disagree with the underlying philosophy of giving the same grade (P) for such wide-ranging results. Yes, seeing a lot of Ps might make you believe that your child is "right on track," I believe a lot of parents ate in for a wake up call when real grades and standards begin to apply.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The "difference" is that aiming for an A is aiming for excellence and the best outcome. Aiming for a P is aiming for some I'll-defined idea of "what a child in this grade should be able to do." that isn't about individual excellence it is about generic county wide standards.

Why do you think that the standards are ill-defined? They're quite well-defined, as far as I can tell. MCPS publishes them. You can look them up.

And if you think that an A necessarily means individual excellence, well...

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No, I am not bothered. First, not everything is a P. Second, these are elementary school children, not adults. Third, elementary school is not a competition.

Hard work does result in something different than mediocre or bad work -- namely, it results in you having done your best.

Then using your logic, why grade anything? Just tell kids to do their best and no need to have anything graded. Teachers can assign a subjective grade for reporting purposes to the county. It doesn't matter, we patents told them to do their best, no feedback is required. Give me a break.

Yes, actually, I would be happy with no grades in elementary school. There are other forms of feedback from teachers that are much more useful. And in elementary school especially, children should be learning to love learning for the sake of learning, not for the sake of grades.

(This is another difference between elementary school and the adult workplace, given that adults typically do not work for the sake of working, but rather for the sake of getting paid.)

I am afraid that your view is very short sighted. If your view is adopted, this country will be in big trouble. Regardless, here is a short response on this matter from someone else.

"For education, an ultimate goal is to get students motivated to learn by themselves such that when they are out of schools, they will overcome challenges by themselves through learning. However, without seeing where they are and knowing what they can achieve, it is absolutely hard for them to get motivated.

Parents have been wondering whether there was a visible path for any P student to get an ES grade. All of us understand that the vibrancy of our society is from diversity instead of all-the-same. It is very hard for anyone to know what the true strength of any student is when he/she gets P all over the place. For these straight P students, their parents do not know where to encourage their kids.

More importantly, without visibility and clarity of the path towards ES, straight P students can be less willing to go extra miles in order to further build up their core strength. This is true for all students regardless of their social-economical status.

I think that maybe, all of us agree that simply producing straight-P students may not necessarily forecast a happy ending for an education system, families, and our society. "

Anonymous wrote:23:16 here. I am talking about 5th grade assignments. There are no comments on either the P or I papers, so it's not obvious what the problem is . Last year we'd get comments like "needs details" or "relate to text," which helped identify where work is needed. On math papers, I can see where individual problems are marked wrong.