Even though I still have about three more years before I hope to be in the class room again, I can't help but think about teaching at this time of year. Summer vacation just started for all the surrounding districts and today happens to be a true summer day reminding me of those stuffy, humid days grading finals in my classroom.
Final exams is one of the things on my mind. I ran into a former colleague at the corner farm stand a couple days ago. Even though it was about 4pm and they only had a half day, she was just heading home from the last day of school. She said it took her extra time to clean up her room; I kidded that I was always running late because of my grading. She then told me that the English department now has common final exams (which technically I knew from a friend) and that they are essay questions. She sympathized for the department because the last final ended at about noon and grades were due the next morning at 8am! Now, on its own, one set of essay exams in that time frame is fine, even for a slow grader like me. But its really six classes of essay exams over four days, with potentially two-thirds of them coming in over 48 hours depending on where a teacher's prep periods fall.
When I heard about the common exam before, I was on the fence about it. I really liked the idea that students in all classes are getting the same basics and that the exams are holding teachers accountable for getting to that material. The scores also give the teachers data on if those grade skills are being mastered. This is good. But, I don't like anything that jeopardizes my freedom in the classroom. A little control and structure and accountability is fine, and I think such measures would force me to be a better teacher. But, I am at a place in my teaching where I do not want to be dictated what to teach, how, and when. Not only is it stifling for me personally, but I don't agree with it for best learning for the students.
Hearing that this common exam was now making a huge grading inconvenience (and perhaps crisis), did not warm any to it. My last year or two of teaching, I swapped the final exam for the final essay to make the final exam grade more meaningful while still allowing me maximum grading time. This common exam forces me to use set material for the exam while demoting our final cumulative project. The sheer amount of grading to do over last few days of school makes me uncomfortable about how I would accomplish it with children at home, not to mention how my feeling rushed could affect the quality of my grading. And, that's not even mentioning if I agree with the importance of the skills featured on the common exam.
In the past, I haven't felt too compelled to worry about curriculum. I find that I hit everything I am meant to without having to pull out my curriculum every time I plan something. The essential skills my department focused on over the years were a mixed bag. Some of them I agreed with completely and worked on diligently over the year. Others, I taught for the couple weeks leading up to the assessment and nothing more because they were generally isolated and not useful for my students. For example, I taught mostly freshmen. A skill I believed in was learning how to cite properly and we worked on it for months, while frivolous skill was memorizing and implementing a set list of supporting techniques.
Having been out of the classroom since the start of the 2009 school year, I've missed the implantation of the common core. I only now just researched it, because, seriously, who reads curriculum for fun during the few awake hours while the children are asleep? I quickly found The Common Care State Standards Initiative, which, to the best I could tell, easily presented exactly the curriculum information I needed. Reading it quickly (with Natalie loudly singing in the background), I agreed with everything I saw. While it would need some unpacking and time to break the standards down to make the presented standard the final product at the end of tenth grade, I felt all the presented material, excepting maybe the reading of primary historical documents, were skills I valued in my classroom and naturally taught. Some of the under reading literature stated very clearly what it is we "do" in English, which is sometimes hard for me to explain.
While I felt the bar might be too high for many students to fully achieve all these standards by the end of the tenth grade, my concern would fall under the next step. Are these standards the basis for standardized testing? Is data involving how students meet these standards used to assess a school or teacher? Is completion of these standards in anyway attached to funding? Will meeting these goals equate graduation? These are the tricky areas for me. As just a curriculum, I thought it was spot on. But if a student needs to meet all of them fully in order to graduate, then I am not. Hell, I'm the teacher and I don't even "spell correctly," to just use one simple standard as an example.
Back to the idea of a common final exam, how would the department pick which of the roughly forty standards to use on a final? Its fair to say that listening and speaking would be out, but that does not limit the selection by much, especially considering all the subcategories under writing. While I admire a common assignment that strives to keep the education of all students at each grade level standard, I fear that actually grading the exam in the allotted time frame undermines the pursuit. And not only my time requirements for the scoring, but also the student time requirements for the test. Unless the exam is made a long term assignment due the day of the final, then there is considerable time pressure on the student to preform, and completing the task quickly is not part of any standard I saw. And, if you are going to take away the time factor for taking the exam, why not just give the assessment a week early to allow less frenzied grading time?
While talking to my friend, I was bravado. I told her that I guess guidance would have to delay starting vacation for me to finish my grades because I was not going to stay up all night to finish my grading when the circumstances were not my fault. I've always felt bad that guidance gets stuck late that last day, but also have resented their pressure to all grades in so quickly. But that is a school structure problem to think about another day. Right now, Natalie is demanding I go get her some "fruit milk" in a princess cup like we used "at the park with the tiger."
No comments:
Post a Comment