Introducing the parents to my grading policy last night at Meet the Teacher Night went really well! Of course they had questions, of course they had concerns. Actually, the concerns were not quite the ones I expected. They were troubled that I was introducing this uncertainty in the senior year. No one really knows how this will work out. For seniors who depend on the first term grades to help cement their acceptance into the colleges they want, not knowing how the grading system works is really scary. (They know what the policy says - they don't know how it works. Experience is needed.) So the parental concerns were not that I was grading differently, but that grading difficulty is really scaring/stressing their daughters out in an already stressful year.
The highlight of MtTN was when one mother pulled me aside after it was all over to talk about her concerns that her daughter hadn't really mastered the material in previous classes. Her response to my new grading system was along the lines of "I think this is wonderful! Why isn't everyone doing this? Why haven't they been using this in other math classes? It would have helped my daughter!"
Gotta admit - that was one response I wasn't expecting. At all.
No comments:
Post a Comment