Categories

Even if you don’t weight your grades (and I really don’t believe you should), you no doubt have categories your assignments fall into. For me, there’s:

• Assignments
• Vocabulary
• Do Firsts/Reading
• Writing

All of the work in my class fits into one of those categories. A few years ago, when I stopped weighting grades, I figured out the percentage of the final grade for each of those categories. That’s changed in a big way this year.

Points

In the past, roughly fifty percent of the total points available in the course have come from assignments in that Writing category. For me, those are formal writing assessments, places where I actually examine the quality of the writing, not just the quantity or existence of it. Those are the dreaded essays. Fifty percent of points, writing that I try my best to hold to high standards with as much objectivity as humanly possible when grading the subjective craft of writing.

This last semester? Roughly thirty percent came from the Writing category. Out of 2347 points available, only 745 came from writing, so about thirty-two percent.

Questions

Is that why my F rate went down? Is that why students’ grades are better? Is that the way it should be? For a long time, I’ve thought that the writing grade in an English class should be THE grade. I’ve even said that the grade a student earns in writing should be the highest grade the student can earn in the course. Since this is not the case, I’m worried that I’m sending students on with inflated grades. Or maybe I’m worried that I’ve always sent them on with deflated grades.

So that’s how I’m starting semester two, in the same existential crisis I’ve been in for years and years. I’ll let you know how that works out.Similar Posts:

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While the day-to-day activities have been smoother and more planned out (I think), it seems like my ability to keep up with grading has taken a significant dive. I only now handed back something to my sophomores that they turned in at the beginning of October. One of those sets of essays I have from my juniors came in on October 21. The last time I graded Read Journals for my sophomores was about a month ago, too.

Yikes! I must have taken a grading vacation for this past month. Still, we’ve done some good work in class during that time and I feel like we’re building to having the types of discussions and activities I want to have in second semester. This semester’s grade is simply going to have a lot less writing on it than years past.

This is all as a result of some significant changes in my personal life (all good stuff, but distracting nonetheless) and the increase in students on my rosters. The slacked grading pace bothers me to such an intense degree that it seems to force me into focusing more on the daily activities. At least there’s some good to come of this: I’m more inclined to work on that handout I’ve always planned to make or to implement that review idea I had last night.

How about you? What have you noticed this semester? What are you doing more or less of? How does that make you feel? Now tell me about your mother. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. No, no. Please go ahead, I’m listening.Similar Posts:

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Times And Handouts

Students are given a paper with three sample introduction paragraphs on it. They need to identify the high, medium, and low in that set of three (yes, all three levels are present). Then, for each paragraph, they need to list at least two reasons why that paragraph is a high, medium, or low.

• All Five Introduction Inspections (PDF) (Word)

Milestones

1. Students work silently for two minutes to rank these paragraphs on their own.
2. Four minutes to work with up to three colleagues: Reach consensus on the ranking of each paragraph and move on to provide each paragraph with at least two reasons for the ranking.
3. Share out.
4. My first whole-class question is to identify the low paragraph. This almost always works and kids hit that one quickly. I tell them I agree and then ask why it’s a low. We follow this discussion for about another five minutes, branching out to why each paragraph is different than the others, whether that makes the paragraph stronger or weaker.

I start out with a heavy hand here (“No, that actually is a complete sentence, so that’s not a problem,” “I disagree; you can have summary in the intro, it’s just not the only thing you should have”). I am hoping to back off this part of the discussion in the remaining two handouts.

Why

I’m hoping to gradually move students to a point where they can see the difference in the quality of writing without the paragraph screaming out, “HELLO! I have TONS of grammatical errors and I DON’T EVEN MAKE SENSE!” I have a total of five of these handouts for this first time through. I took the writing from their last in-class essay, modifying it a bit in places to create what I need. The first handout is the one with the most obvious distinction between the levels. It gets fuzzier from there until we end up with the exact same paragraph on handouts four and five, just edited to fit those performance levels (high, medium, low). By the end, I have the low as a paragraph that is mostly free of error, makes sense, but still doesn’t do the job because of poor focus, sentence variety, and level of vocabulary.

Differences

This activity presents a limited amount of work for students to evaluate. In the past, I’ve had students working on grading entire essays, while this only asks them to focus on a single paragraph. And I’m clear in that there are three performance levels present, making the evaluation a touch easier than without those guidelines. Further, I free the students of actually attaching a letter grade to this, favoring something more like a ranking system. When we finish, students have copies of all of this writing along with reasons for their rankings. We take about twenty minutes total to work on these and only discuss this two days a week. Since I’m spreading out the work over time, I hope to keep them thinking about good and bad writing for the majority of the semester, instead of packing all that thinking into a day or two, concentrated toward the end of a writing unit. I also hope to continue this kind of thing in the future, moving to body paragraphs next (Body Builders?), making our way to conclusions (Concluding Creations?) by the last few grade periods.

What do you think about this? Could you see a way to use something like this for each part of the writing process? Do you see value in this kind of examination of student models? Have you done anything similar?Similar Posts:

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I’m upset I didn’t get this rolling right away. October 15 is the deadline and this could be a really cool opening project. I fear it’s too late to get my students started on it because we’re already on to other things and this would need to be built into your course from the beginning. It’s only open to those graduating in 2011, so the majority of my students would be out, but we could still create one of these products and keep it in the can until next year. Dust it off, update a few things, and send it on. Maybe.

Or perhaps this is a great end-of-the-year project. Hand out the guidelines in March and start the tumblers clicking upstairs. I’m sure there’s a way to work in some kind of year-end reflection.Similar Posts:

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Vocabulary

We spend two weeks on vocab just like normal, a list at the beginning of the week with some vocab work due and review happening mid-week. Instead of having a test at the end of every week, we go two weeks with no test, then go into a week off to review the terms every day and end the week with a test. That results in fewer tests, more time to play with the words, and I’m hoping greater understanding of the words. I have always thought that I don’t do enough review. Now, with our week off, we start each day that week with a kind of review: jigsaw, crossword, flyswatter, sentences, writing, etc. We end the off week with a cumulative test. I plan to make each vocab test worth more points than the one before it. I hope that will make current vocabulary success more important than past failure.

Read Journals

While I’ve done one read journal every week in the past, we write for two weeks and take a week off from writing to just read that week. Students write two read journals, then take a breather from writing and only have to concentrate on the reading pace for that week. That gives students time to catch up on a few things (the actual writing of read journals tends to be what bogs them down) and I get a week to catch up on grading those journals. I want this to temper the fact that my students who are readers hate this assignment because they have to write too much and my students who are not readers hate this assignment because they have to read too much. The timing here is my attempt to give both sets of kids something that makes this work feel more possible.

Plans

If I focus my instruction on, say, use of evidence for two weeks, collect a piece of writing where all I evaluate is that use of evidence (giving the students a week off from this type of instruction), I think this will let me target where things go wrong. Then again, maybe it won’t. Still, the idea of playing around with how I time and pace the work in the class is one I’m ready to examine further. I’ll keep you posted.Similar Posts:

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