Me? Perfect attendance, classwork completion, homework completion, these aren’t my goals.

at least in High School

Ask yourself this… if you suddenly found yourself back in middle school, would you attend everyday if you knew you could get away with not attending. Would you want to?

My issue in school was always homework. I didn’t see the point in doing it if I knew the material. What is the goal of your class?

A. master material

B. master material, spend 4 hours a week doing math at home

C. master material, spend 4 hours a week doing math, spend 5 hours a week sitting in chair

Bottom line: give him the C+

@Doug, generally speaking, teachers in the States aren’t rewarded for test scores, much less tests which aren’t normed against anything greater than one’s own class, which doesn’t give me a lot of incentive to inflate my students’ grades.

My guess is that Aaron doesn’t show up to school because it doesn’t have meaning for him. When he gets a job it likely will have meaningly, if only because of the need for a paycheck, and he’ll show up.

Anyway… this type of teacher assessment seems crazy to me. Teachers obviously want to appear successful and therefore are likely to ‘upgrade’ marks and grades. At least over here it’s only coursework that’s affected. And even that’s changing next year!

We still have problems in the UK, however. Mostly it’s the other way round – kids being ‘hothoused’ when they’re in primary schools which gives them artificially and almost impossible-to-attain targets for GCSE examinations.

It’s a mad old world and schools don’t make it any less so… :-o

I totally recognize the situation. My school recognized those with high attendance at our awards ceremony two days ago. Students were honored for 90% attendance. You miss one day every two weeks and we praise it? It makes me wonder how so many of our students do pass from one year to the next.

Have to say I’m happy with my 60% mastery and 40% other work* breakdown this year. Since I’m not pure mastery, Aaron would probably be failing in my classroom. I’d give him the extra credit assignments** I have and he’d be set to pass. He still wouldn’t have the stellar grade, but it doesn’t sound like he’s got the material down cold yet either.

*Warm-ups, cool-downs, homework if I give it…

**Extra word problems a la warm-ups and concept posters. The posters are my new favorite thing. Give the students a method of studying. I leave them up so you can use them as memory prompts during quizzes. It goes back to the can you apply the information task instead of the can you just remember the information.

Somehow I had created this vision of an entire department assessing students based upon mastery of mathematical concepts.

Nope. That was the last school. This one has made some impressive strides in two years, though.

There has to be a better was of doing this.