Monday, March 26, 2012

(One of) My First Hard Days

Though I woke up this morning with the confidence that today would be a good day, and even got on the road a solid 15 minutes head of schedule to assure that I would be the first in line for the copy machine this morning, today did not turn out to be a good day. The moment my students arrived, their grumblings reminded me of the severe disappointment that I experienced on Friday while grading their first To Kill a Mockingbird reading quizzes. This trimester, in attempt to align with the new national standards, my school is trying something new. We are assigning literature to our students as homework while teaching them unrelated material in class and assessing them on their reading comprehension on a weekly basis. This differs significantly from the heavy discussion based classroom I am used to and the changes are not being warmly received. 

The first quiz was a wake up call. To me and the students. Of my 32 students first hour, 5 passed the quiz with higher than a 60%. This was simply a reading quiz that was meant to assess their higher level thinking skills as related to this novel. It had to compensate for days without discussion or even mention of the novel. As hard as this has been on me to give up my favorite aspect of the English classroom, it must be equally hard on my students. With this being one of the first grades on the books for the new trimester, many of my students are currently failing the class. They, and their parents, are freaking out.

The complaints, both justified and unjustified, were mentally exhausting. I did everything within my power to console them, however, and constructed for them a success strategy. Everyone who did not pass this quiz is required to do a reading guide for the next set of chapters to be tested. If they pass, then they are welcome to discontinue the use of the reading guide, but they may find it helpful for their future success. If they fail a later quiz, the reading guide will be reinstated. This will be true for the rest of the students for the rest of the year. I also showed them an example of a quiz turned in by one of their peers that was done tremendously well. His name was not on it and in no way was he identified, but he set the example for my expectations for the rest of the class. As a last measure, I asked my students to anonymously respond to the following questions:

How much of the book did you read?

How accurate was this quiz in assessing how much and how well you read the book?

Their responses were not surprising. Of my 32 students first hour, 7 claimed to have read every word of every page assigned. That means the other 25 used a combination of laziness and sparknotes to fail the quiz. 5th hour did marginally better. It was a rough day. Students were upset. I was fried.

I had a heart to heart with my students and told them that I did not intend to alter the quizzes. We were going to work harder to raise up to the high bar rather than lower it to met our sub-par standards. This, I think, was the right approach, even if they don't see it yet. Hopefully, one day they will.

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