Week Ten Journal Entry

OK, the thing that blew my mind in the high school atmosphere was the prevalence of drugs in the teenage culture. Now in the middle school atmosphere, the thing that is blowing my mind is the level of cheating I’m seeing among the students in class. Here are a few of the things that have happened since I began second placement: I've quietly spoken to J. and M. for looking on their neighbors’ papers during a test. Mrs. B. caught a student filling in answers to his homework as she called out the correct answers. Another day, as students graded each other’s papers, a girl asked her neighbor not to mark all of her incorrect answers. The girls agreed that if Mrs. B. really cared about this work, she would grade it herself. They knew that I overhead their comments.

I know that I have to walk a fine line here with Mrs. B. I don’t want to come across as being critical of the way she conducts her classroom, but at the same time, I have to find a way to reign this in during my teaching days. I know that I will have to cruise the room a lot and stop allowing the students to grade each other’s papers--at least in the way they are currently grading.

This brings up another issue. The amount of grading a teacher has to do is overwhelming. I experienced this for a mere four weeks during my first placement. I didn’t want to collect all the work the students did "for a grade," but I found myself saying, “If I think that you guys aren’t really doing this work, I’ll be taking it up for a grade.” I often felt that taking a grade was my only leverage to get students to do their work. The result was that I was swamped with work in the evening, when I really needed a break and a little rest. To avoid this trap, many teachers do let students grade their fellow students’ work in class. I know that, in addition to the types of dishonesty I’ve described above, student grading also presents privacy concerns.

The best solution I’ve seen came from Mrs. K. at Bob Jones. After her students had done a particular assignment, Mrs. K. would tell them to put away their pencils, pens, and all their personal things. She then handed out red pens and told the students to correct their own papers as she called out the answers. Mrs. K had eliminated the privacy concern, but it would be more difficult to eliminate student dishonesty. I only observed two of Mrs. K’s classes, so I’m not sure how she was implementing this practice over time. In order for self-grading to work, it would be important for the teacher to spot-check the student grading and come down very hard on cheaters. I would like to hear your opinion on this issue, Dr. O’Brien. As I’ve said, one of my goals for my second placement is to find ways to work smarter, and this is one problem I would really like to begin solving.