Well, this week has certainly been interesting. I went the first three days of my new semester without my mentor teacher. It was a little scary but probably a good challenge for me. I had to set the tone for the semester in those days, and it was rough. Even though I'm teaching two Math 3 classes, the personalities of the two classes are totally different. First period is sophomores, and they're mostly quiet and mostly very quick with math. Sixth period is juniors, and they're extremely talkative. So that's a huge battle, and on top of that, they're all at very different skill levels. Some are simultaneously taking Math 3 and Math 4 to get ahead, and others barely scraped by in Math 2. And it's a larger class, so it's really hard to give everyone the attention they need. Moreover, half the time I'm just trying to get them to stop talking. I unfortunately kicked two students out of class on Thursday to make a statement. I hate that I had to do that, but I was so patient the first three days. I had students coming up to me after class asking if class was going to be that loud all semester, so I knew I had to do something. It's really hard to not be an authoritarian teacher.
I must admit that after the first week, I feel a bit discouraged. Between the kicking students out of class and seeing some students so discouraged with exponent rules, I'm already starting to feel like a really bad teacher. I'm frustrated also that I don't usually know what I'm teaching until the day before. On one hand, I'm grateful that four of the math teachers are teaching the same course, so we all co-create materials. It makes my job easier in that I don't have to make everything from scratch. For one, I don't know the curriculum well enough to know what I would need to create to teach an Algebra 2 course. On the other hand, I hate that I have to wait for the other teachers to send their materials. It gives me less time to change things if I want to change them, and it gives me less time to figure out how I want to teach something. And I don't have the experience that the other teachers have to know what will be hard to teach and where I should stop and spend more time. I'm also worried that I'm already behind. I have to finish teaching how to scale graphs and introduce exponential functions tomorrow, and it's just really a lot. Plus, there are already students that have bombed the first quiz and students who have already surpassed their maximum number of excusable absences for the term. How do I help them all?!?
I've also switched seminars, so I'm taking on a larger role in teaching reading and writing. While I'm excited about it, I'm already so overwhelmed with all the math stuff that I'm just not sure what to do.
Question: If 30% of my students' grades are based on their classwork, how should I check it? Also, if 20% of their grade is homework, how should I be grading that?
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I think the hardest part about teaching at lower levels, especially in math, is that it's very difficult to grade based on "progress." Now, if you ask students to show all of their work, and you can grade each step's correctness, etc., that gives you more flexibility and you don't have to go down with the big scary red pen and say "WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!"
ReplyDeleteOf course, as you're well aware, that takes toooooooooons more time to grade =/ but it might help in terms of figuring out who needs help with what...?
Yes, grading on progress isn't really possible for homework and classwork. The way I usually get feedback on what they're not understanding is through their weekly quizzes. I definitely have them show their work there, and I do grade every single step to see what they don't understand. However, when classwork and homework is daily - I can't possibly collect and grade 2 assignments every day. So is it fair to simply check their work at the beginning of every class, which means a grade almost purely based on completion? Or is it fair to collect random homework/classwork assignments to grade more in-depth? Or is there another system that I'm not thinking of?
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