Hedgetoad Teaching

As strange as it is to have a Thursday off, I hope everyone is recharging and coming up with new ideas to inspire and motivate. I will be meeting with my department members to grade HSPE type essays for the grade wide assessment. Given the additional duties we all have, it’s the only time we could come up with to meet to get it done. We are, however, meeting at a local coffee shop rather than the school building… comfy chairs and bagels. Should actually be pretty fun. And now you know how truly geeky English teachers are!

There have been a few discussions on grading going around the ‘ole school building this month. A new idea (for us) being floated is changing our grading structure to ones that have been tried in other districts. First, changing our grading system to a 1 thru 5 scale for everything. It sounds like a bit more work on some things – grading, converting to 100% scale and then converting to 1 thru 5 scale… but I suppose it would a somewhat easy switch for English teachers. Second, no longer giving a grade lower than 50%, even if a student turned nothing in – not even a piece of paper with a name on it. I know there are many schools who have made this change and it always invokes controversy. The theory behind these changes is that it severely punishes students who don’t turn in assignments, as opposed to those who turn something in… bad or good. Some would argue that if a student can pass an exam, but not bother to do any homework, should the grade be based upon their learning or their...