Readers Response #4

I was so glad to read about a good grading system, because the one that I have been dealing with at Blandy is terrible. The children are penalized for missing one question on the “easy” part dropping their score all the way to a 1.5. They do not even take into consideration how they did on the harder and challenging parts of the assessments. I have seen this happen with over half of my students. They make a careless mistake on the easy part, and they already write the score 1.5 without looking at the others parts. I liked the grading approach that included two grades-a personal one and a traditional one. I like the traditional grades because they do show where a student is academically, but it isn’t on a scale of a 1.0 to a 4.0 like my school system is. Traditional grading uses letter grades, which are a lot better. The personal grade helps children set and achieve goals for themselves without the worries of being compares to others. I like the idea of allowing the children to set or assist the teacher in setting their goals. It serves as a motivation or an incentive to some of them. I also really liked that it was clearly stated in all of the approaches the importance of understanding by both the parents and students. We still have parents at my school that constantly call asking how to interpret or even read their child’s progress reports. If they say parent involvement in their child’s education is so important, then how are they supposed to be involved if they can’t even understand how their child’s education is displayed?