Sunday, March 19, 2017

How Does Someone Work In An Environment Like That?

My students may not all be going to Stanford, but most of them put forth some effort, even if only a little bit.  I'd feel helpless and hopeless if I had to teach more than one or two of these:
What I got was "I tried" - like that matters when you are unable to correct your erroneous attempts. So I drew the tree diagram. And he quit doing any work for the rest of the period.

I could not get him to see that 1) he needed to write it down 2) he needed to learn it and 3) there is no participation credit in his grade.
Teachers need to prepare high-quality lessons outside of class. But inside class, students need to be working harder than the teacher does.

2 comments:

Ellen K said...

This is the assumed posture by too many administrations. For example, I can already see the concept of grading is fading in my district. Instead students are supposed to create a digital portfolio that demonstrates abilities across a broad range of topics. I don't see how this will ever be a criteria for admission in an elite university. Some things have to be quantified in order to be compared and grades, test marks are ways of doing that.

Auntie Ann said...

We were just at our kid's high school last night. They put up a slide which said that 40% of the class of 2017 had a 4.1 gpa or higher at the end of AY2016. When essentially everyone is running a better than 4.0 average, how are colleges supposed to figure out who to take?