A meeting is scheduled. With The Boy’s teachers. Not yet an official IEP meeting, just an I’m-so-sick-of-you-not-knowing-what-you’re-doing meeting. Nah, I won’t really say that. But I do have dreams, yes DREAMS about running an inservice, actual PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT for these teachers, and not just about how to effectively approach a student and his/her IEP, but about basic things like GRADING and ASSESSMENTS.
I was a decent teacher. I don’t claim to have been the best teacher at the school where I worked, not by a long shot. But I did know a thing or two about exactly how assessments (quizzes, tests, and projects to a normal person) are supposed to work, and how to effectively use and fairly grade those assessments, skills that The Boy’s teachers apparently haven’t yet mastered.
A 65/100 on a quiz with 10 multiple choice questions just doesn’t compute…
I guess I was spoiled by the staff I worked with. We didn’t have to argue very long that grading a kid on effort just wasn’t fair to anyone, and definitely watered-down the picture of whether or not the student knew the content. We didn’t have differing opinions on how much quizzes, tests, and projects should be worth — assignments and quizzes should rarely be worth more than 25 points or so, and tests and projects were usually between 50 and 100. Assignments and quizzes, we agreed, showed how well the teacher was teaching the content (formative assessments), while tests and projects showed how well the student had learned the content (summative assessments). To me, this is TEACHING 101. Fellow teachers, Amiright?
This reminds me of the meeting I had at The Boy’s previous school where they thought the use of rubrics was such a novel idea… “We don’t really use those…” they said… (I was taught to use rubrics in my teaching in TEACHER COLLEGE in the 1990s… 20 years ago…).
My challenge is to attend this meeting and not come off as this know-it-all mom telling them how to do their jobs. My challenge is gently nudge them towards doing their jobs without them realizing that I’m telling them how to do their jobs.
Time to get clever.
Simple. I Just Do. 