The weight of teaching

[taylweaver]

Over the past few days, I have come to realize just how much responsibility teaching puts on my shoulders. On Monday, I had to grade papers for the first time. With math, this is not so difficult - the answer is either right or wrong, and the questions I asked did not really lend themselves to partial credit - though that will complicate things next time. But when grading essays, things get much harder. There is no objective way to say which paper is better than another. I tried to quantify it. I tried to use a rubric.

For those who don't know what a rubric is - I sometimes forget that it is not part of everyone's everyday vocabulary - just mine - it looks something like this:

Outline Organization

1 Missing Poor

2 Incomplete Getting there

3 Great Wonderful

But add a few more categories, and a better description for each number.

So I tried that system, but I realized it did not quite match with my idea of which students were writing "good" essays. And then I had to tweak the system. And I had to read each paper multiple times. And it took me hours.

After all that, I still end up feeling like some of my decisions were a bit arbitrary. And these possibly arbitrary decisions determine what grades some of my students got - the difference between an A and a B, a B and a C. This is a big responsibility.

But I have learned that teachers also bear a different kind of weight. Teachers get approached with many questions. Some of these questions reach beyond the realm of education.

Yesterday, a ten-year-old asked: "What's a suicide bomber?" She then added, "What's suicide? So-and-so told me I should know already."

Without really thinking, I answered something along the lines of: "Suicide is when a person kills themself. A suicide bomber is someone who wants to kill other people so badly that he is willing to kill himself along with them."

It was only afterward that I paused to think about whether or not I should have answered at all - though, upon reflection, I decided that if she was asking, I should answer. She knew the context - she asked me if I had heard about what happened in London - and she had read the phrase in a newspaper - I am guessing it was in a headline.

What to say after answering is an even tougher call. Do I reassure her? Do I tell her these are very bad people? I didn't say anything of substance. In retrospect, I think I should have asked how hearing the definition made her feel, what was going through her head. Maybe then I would have know what she needed to hear next.

I suppose teachers are not the only ones who face these questions and decisions. Parents do too, of course. But in some ways, it's more complicated as a teacher. For one thing, I have known my students for little more than a week. And then there are the parents themselves - if I make a bad decision, or a decision that they think is wrong, I have them to answer to.

Comments

Re: Grading

[(Anonymous)]

From: Mar Gavriel

j00j wrote:

It seems like grading is one of those things that gets easier with practice.

There's a renowned private school in Brooklyn known as St. Ann's, in which no grades are ever given. (The Catholic-sounding name of the school is misleading; the school in fact has no connections to any religious group. However, when they first started, around forty-ish years ago, they were renting space from a church known as St. Ann's, so they became known as "the St. Ann's School". The name stuck. This being New York, many of the students in the school are non-Christian, and I even know a very famous couple of frum Jewish educators who sent their eldest child there for a number of years.)The school goes from Pre-K through 12^th grade, and apparently, colleges are willing to accept the teacher-reports about 12^th-graders in lieu of GPAs.

But wait-- taylweaver has been searching for jobs in NYC schools for the last few months, so she probably knows all this already. I do not need to bore you with information you already know....

For more information, click on this link: http://www.saintanns.k12.ny.us/home.htm

Re: Grading

[(Anonymous)]

SAR in Riverdale doesn't have grades, either.