Mrs. Evans Blog

Right now my kids are taking a test, and I'm pondering grading. If we want future teachers to know what our students got out of our class, why don't we just give them one big test at the end of the semester, and that's their grade? I know we would have to be very careful about keeping everything fresh and constant and using it multiple times so they are prepared and remember it until then, but is that what really matters? I want them to know how they're doing along the way. For that reason I like grading things along the way so they see if they're doing things correctly or not. Couldn't this be done just as easily in a formative way? We could even grade some things and make them track their own progress, but not actually grade or count anything until their test at the end of the year. In this way, we wouldn't be held back by keeping things consistent. Right now we test over everything multiple times. I'm not knocking out system at all, because I've...

So the last week we've had two nights of conferences. They went really well this year! I felt like I did such a better job of letting parents know throughout the semester about concerns or options for additional help for students that needed it before conferences instead of discussing what we could start doing to get some kids help at conferences. We are right in the middle of a unit on proofs. The way we teach them really bother me. I'm not talking about how my collegues and I have chosen to deliver instruction, scaffold, and build up to harder and harder proofs. I'm talking about the idea of messy confusing incredibly inelegant 2-column proofs... Proofs should be simple and elegant. If we could teach them with that idea always in mind and let kids explain however they want (this would be a perfect place to allow more writing in math) they would seem so much more meaningful in my opinion.