Week Seven Journal Entry

As I've been wrapping up my Julius Caesar unit and my mythology unit, I've been grading unit assessments and returning them to students. Some of the grades are really low. I don't like to hand low grades back to students. Several students created fantastic statues of Julius Caesar characters, but the written portions of their projects were lacking or nonexistent. In most of these situations, the problem has been the student's failure to follow directions. With almost every assessment I have created, I've given the students a project description, along with some sort of rubric, even if it was minimal. If the students cared to know point values for different aspects of the assignment, those were available.



I do believe that students and teachers have to learn each others' styles. If I worked with these students for longer than eight weeks, I think some of them would learn to take me seriously. They would realize that when I say this project has three parts, they really have to do all three parts. Simply doing a great job on one part won't get you a good grade.



One thing I'm doing to encourage students, even when I have to give them bad grades, is to make encouraging comments on their papers. I've heard one teacher say that he can make a "C" feel like a congressional medal of honor, and he can make an "A-" feel like a slap in the face. He's probably doing that through his comments on student papers. I've been giving a lot of feedback, and I hope I've been able to encourage students, even when I've had to give low grades.

The traditional grading system certainly is not perfect. It doesn't seem fair that one student easily earns A's every week while another has to scratch and claw for C's. However, I have recently been a student in a class in which I knew the professor planned to give every student an A. Knowing she felt this way definitely affected the amount of attention I paid to that class. It became a lower priority for me than the other class I was taking. That experience convinced me that, even though the traditional grading system is not perfect, it does impact student motivation; as a teacher, I'm not ready to abandon it. So I keep assigning grades--high grades and low grades, and I try to find something positive to say even when I have to assign a low grade.