Parent FAQ

Parents, below are some questions that have come up via email, discussion, etc., as well as my responses. I invite your feedback and further discussion.

1. 8/26/2010: Should my student use a planner? I hear that the school won't purchase them for the kids this year.

Regarding the planner, Denise told me that the 8th graders won't be having them this year. I'm going to be doing a lot of work with the kids on developing personal organization strategies that work for them as individuals. There will likely be a half-dozen strategies that we'll end up with and the kids can choose whichever (combination?) works best for them. As long as it DOES work, I'll defer to their judgment and give them autonomy, but if their disorganization or lack of a functional system impedes them, I'll probably impose a mandated set of daily tasks (like filling in a daily planner, etc.)

2. 12/10/2010: How come some English assignments (essays) aren't graded yet? You've found my Achilles heel -- the delay in my feedback for essays. It is a thing that I've put off far beyond reason. There are four projects that deserve some valuable final evaluation and/or feedback: Reader Profile, BTT 7, BTT Final, and Hunger Games. For each of those projects there was formative feedback from peers and parents, but I have yet to do the final comments.

There are some English teachers who say that the grading and evaluation should happen during the process but not of the product. That publishing the product (ie. on a website) is "the ultimate" evaluation. I understand the philosophy behind that, but I don't fully buy in.

So, I will certainly get to it. But, in the short term, to decrease the their possible stress of having a large-point assignment 'open' in the grade book (nothing more unnerving for the grade conscious, than some yet-to-be-scored large-value assignments), I've set their point value of the Reader Profile and Terabithia writings to 0 in PowerSchool. When I do add in the points, it will probably be at the beginning of second trimester so that they can redo/revise things as needed. That improvement process will be valuable as well, I hope. Although the timing is certainly not great.

I experimented with a few different ways of giving the students "live" feedback, and using the FlipVideo camera is the best option so far. I did a few samples and posted the videos to the student's heumann.org account. During the compression/upload process the quality went way down, so I've decided to just save the files on CD's at full quality. Also, I need to come up with a way to see the video at the same time as I'm recording it -- video out to a small monitor. But that solution hasn't hit me yet, and isn't really keeping me from continuing with the current solution. I'm headed to school tonight to do a few more recordings.

Sorry for the long reply and I do appreciate your question -- good motivation for me to just get to it.