I doubled up on preps this week. I turned two classes into four and spent ten free-time hours planning twelve hours of instruction. Any teacher looking to stay sane and healthy will tell you that a 1:1 ratio of planning hours to instructional hours (or anything close) is a lousy way to go about it.
Today was a special occasion, however. A terrible day for free-time, but a proud day for assessment.
On Tuesday I passed out quarter-sheets of paper, one to every student.
These are satisfying times to assess the way I do. We’ve got Dead Week starting Tuesday, finals the week after that, and then grades are locked. Students are panicked, but the way I assess, they can focus that panic.
“How do I get my grade up?” they ask.
Most of the time they bring their Concept Checklist [pdf | cwk] along. If it’s filled completely, I know they’ve bought into the system.
“Test data is the educator’s report card, and we need to be held accountable to it, if only as a small attempt to rectify the imbalance between how poor teaching affects life outcomes of the teacher, versus how it affects life outcomes of the student.”
Dude is so on the money.
[Update: check out the comprehensive resource.]
Over the weekend I wrote up a mini-thesis on my assessment methods, which, though standard operating procedure at my last school, are pretty foreign here. I gave it a deliberately confrontational title, “How Math Must Assess.” SOP here is to use whatever tests the manufacturer supplies and give them whenever the manufacturer arbitrarily decided to divide the textbook. I worry that this arbitrary approach to testing stirs up a lot of hatred for math. The implication I try to avoid, since it’s so cocky coming from a third-year teacher’s keyboard, is that I know how to do it better.