Student success is a multi-faceted concept, entailing not just academic progress, but also other factors such as attendance, responsibility, organization, etc. As a guardian, you have access to a number of different information sources that you can use to determine your child’s success level in all classes, and also some sources that are particular to my classes.
First, the parent portal gives you access to information regarding your child’s attendance and academic progress. You can review daily attendance records, as well as stored quarterly academic reports from all classes. You can also access their credit summary page, which tracks credit acquisition across all secondary school years.
To access the parent portal login, you can visit the parents section of the school website, or use this link: parent portal. If you need help logging in, such as obtaining a username or password information, please contact the school at 519-773-3174. I do not have access to this information.
In addition to these school-maintained resources, I have also recently begun publishing the tools I use to track progress in my classes online. These spreadsheets primarily contain information about assignment progress: whether work has been submitted; whether students are frequently using extensions, or are absent when assignments are due; whether students have submitted required work for plagiarism checking; etc. In some classes homework completion is tracked, while in others, such as Grade 12 University English, information on independent study projects is monitored.
All information on the progress spreadsheets is listed by student code name to protect confidentiality. Your child should be able to share their codename with you, but if for any reason this is problematic, feel free to contact me by email and I will share the codename with you. Only guardians of students under the age of 18 are entitled to their child’s codename - unless the student has provided a signed permission form for ongoing communication.
Links to progress spreadsheets are included on each course page of my class website. If you need information on understanding how to review and better understand the spreadsheets, you can read the resource I put together on this topic for guardians here: Reading the Progress Spreadsheet.
In recent years, I’ve found myself investing an ever-increasing amount of additional time tracking issues that students should be handling themselves, such as late assignments, catching up on missed in-class work, behaviour issues, etc. This increased load has required a change in how I communicate issues with parents. The amount of time I would need to spend on the phone to meet this new demand would be prohibitive.
As a result, I first moved to email correspondence, and then, after realizing that I was writing the same information repeatedly, to form emails. This frees up a considerable amount of time for me to spend addressing student issues, rather than wasting time reinventing the wheel by finding unique ways to describe them.
Email has other advantages as well. For one, it does not require both guardian and teacher to be available at the same time. All participants are free to respond to email at a time that is convenient. Email also provides a written record of communications, in case actions need to be tracked or information referenced.
While it may feel a bit impersonal, please know that the important element of the communication is the information being related, and not the method of transmission. Although I confess that sending form emails feels a bit distant, even to me as the sender, I am willing to endure that feeling so that I can keep more guardians in the loop.
You can help keep these lines of communication open by responding to all emails to let me know you have received them. I'm not asking guardians to respond in detail to emails immediately, but a simple "message received" within twenty-four hours of receipt of a message from me is appreciated to avoid unnecessary tracking and repeated attempts to communicate.
One of the most valuable resources available to students is extra assistance from teachers, yet this resource is sadly underutilized. I make myself available extensively throughout the day, including before school, during my prep period, at lunch, and after school. A full list of my available times is posted outside my classroom door each year.
Although I am often open for drop-in appointments, the best strategy is for students to book appointments with me in advance to ensure that I am available and not committed to meetings, other help sessions, etc.
It is important for your child to come prepared to meaningfully engage in a help session. Students who arrive saying only "I'm lost" are difficult to assist. Students should review resources provided in class, and evaluate each step of a problem to figure out where their difficulty begins. This way, I will have some information to work with in order to accurately address the issue.
Finally, in order to make the most of help sessions, students must actually act on the suggestions I provide. Simply attending a help session is not a guarantee that a student will experience improvement. In recent years I have noticed a strange trend of students seeking help, failing to implement my suggestions, and then expressing confusion regarding why they didn't improve.
As a practice, I do not allow guardians to schedule help sessions for their children.
One of the major victories in a child's educational journey is growth toward taking control of their own academic success. Students are in the best position to be aware of when they are struggling and when they need help. Learning to seek out that support will make them more responsible for their learning, and thus more successful in the long run. Allowing guardians to schedule extra help sessions for students who are struggling not only delays the moment when students are required to advocate for themselves, but also leaves me trying to help a student who is reluctant to be there in the first place. We do not help students by taking initiative on their behalf. This only postpones the day when they will take initiative on their own.
If your child is struggling, but refuses to schedule help sessions, this is an issue that needs to be dealt with before whatever academic issue they are grappling with. Please contact me by email and we can bring in school support services, including Student Success, Guidance, Special Education, and administration to investigate the situation.
Many students tend to be understandably anxious about their written work, especially assignments such as essays that are typically worth a larger percentage of their overall grade. As a result, students frequently turn to staff, guardians, and even other students in search of editing to improve their work.
Editing can be a very helpful act, but it can also impair student learning if not implemented correctly. If editing is not used as an opportunity for growth and improvement, then students miss an important avenue to improvement, and valid assessment of your child's ability becomes compromised.
In short, when editing, I recommend reading your child's work and identifying errors only in general terms. If you see a spelling error, circle it, but do not provide the correct spelling. If you see missing punctuation, circle the space where the punctuation should be, but do not insert it yourself. When something your child has written is confusing, do not reword it yourself, but underline or highlight the section and advise them to revise it for better clarity.
In all instances, put the effort to improve back on your child, so that editing becomes a learning experience. The goal is for students to become their own editors. Eventually, you should stop pointing out individual errors and instead offer general feedback, such as "I noticed a lot of spelling errors," or "I'm not sure you have included enough examples."
I encourage guardians who are interested in more information on editing their children's work to read my A Guardian's Guide to Editing Assignments for your Child.
Unfortunately, there are no extra credit opportunities in East Elgin English classes.
As noted in the syllabus sent home in the first week, each assignment in the course has a fixed value. In all English classes, 70% of the grade is derived from term work in the form of essays, presentations, and other assignments, and each assignment has a pre-determined weight value. An additional 30% is derived from a variety of culminating assignments, sometimes including a final exam, for a total of 100%. For this reason, there is no room for extra credit assignments.
If students could submit additional assignments, this would have the impact of lessening the value of the previously completed work. Although this might unfold in a student's favour if the earlier work was graded lower than hoped, it would be unfair to other students whose work on that assignment would continue to carry the same weighting. In addition, mathematically, it is highly unlikely that one or two assignments at the end of a course will meaningfully change a student's grade, given the weight all the other assignments continue to carry.
Extra credit opportunities are typically requested at the end of a course when a student is unhappy with their final mark. To avoid the need for this, students can and should be monitoring their success throughout the course, and seeking assistance on term and culminating assignments before they are completed, rather than looking for last-minute improvement opportunities.
As someone who can never take a vacation outside the busiest times, I am sadly aware that high demand and opportunistic travel corporations make taking a vacation during our regularly scheduled holidays a costly experience. Likewise, guardians can struggle when scheduling time off from work during typical vacation periods, as numerous employees find themselves requesting the same vacation days. As a result, increasing numbers of parents and guardians are choosing to take their children out of classes outside regular vacation periods.
While I sympathize with the desire to share vacation time with family without spending an arm and a leg, and also with the desire for students to keep up with their studies, I am unable to accommodate requests for homework packages for students who are taking vacation during class time.
Our day to day activities in class are dynamically driven by student progress, and student need, both of which require flexibility in delivery. This flexibility means that often lesson planning is being modified "on the fly," and not delivered according to a rigid schedule that could be provided to absent students in substitution for their attendance in class.
Even if this was not the case, given all the responsibilities of lesson planning, marking, tracking attendance, pursuing missing assignments, offering extra help sessions, communicating with parents, etc. there is simply not enough time remaining to create custom-tailored homework packages for each student who will be away while in-class instruction is taking place. The numbers of students seeking such accommodations grows each year. It is just not feasible to offer that level of support.
Please note that I also cannot make any assurances that your child's success in English will be unaffected by his or her vacation absence. Day to day activities and instruction make up a vital component of student progress through class, and although handouts and notes can be collected after the fact, there are no guarantees that they can be an adequate substitute for presence and participation. The degree of impact varies from student to student, and is dependent on a variety of factors, such as effort applied on return, previous grasp of material, access to peer support, etc. I have a detailed form students can pick up on their return and use to help them collect and review information they missed. I encourage students to monitor their understanding of concepts closely when they return, and seek extra help if they feel at all confused about new material. I am available for extra help most lunch hours, as well as after school; however, I do not reteach lessons that students missed.
Over the past decade, I, as well as my colleagues in the English department, have recognized a growing reluctance by students to participate in presentations in front of their peers. Increasing numbers of students are making requests to their English teachers to let them present at lunch, or after school, rather than during regular class time, in an attempt to avoid presenting in front of their classmates. Other students are refusing to do any presentations outright, and expressing a preference to "take a zero," rather than present in front of the class.
The oral communications expectations satisfied by seminars, speeches, and other presentations are contained in the Oral Communication strand of all grade levels of the Ontario Secondary School English Curriculum. It is one of the four strands of our English curriculum, which also include Reading and Literature Studies, Writing, and Media Studies. Typically, oral communication strategies comprise over 15% to 20% of the 70% term mark, and over 5% of the 20% culminating activities.
By their very nature, presentations are nerve wracking. It is obviously difficult to stand up in front of our peers and speak, and this is a truth regardless of age, or experience. However, the answer to fear is not to give in to it, but to face and overcome it. Students will not become better presenters by avoiding presentations. As teachers, we have a responsibility to prepare our students for future studies, and for the lives outside of secondary school that await them.
Each year students are expected to take on increasingly more challenging presentations. For example, by Grade 12 University level, students are required to self-select a novel, study it thoroughly over the course of the semester, and then are responsible for presenting on that novel by themselves for twenty to twenty-five minutes. Excusing students from the experience of presenting a five minute speech or seminar in junior courses robs them of the opportunity to prepare for this eventuality. There is a similar growth expectation in the College stream as well.
Likewise, in most post-secondary studies, presentations are an expected component of evaluation. Many future careers that students pursue will also involve speaking to people, whether in small groups or large, and in environments where there are considerably less supports available than are currently offered in the English classroom. Not surmounting this obstacle now can be revealed as a career-crippling mistake a few years down the road.
I encourage guardians to speak with their children about presentations, and to emphasize the importance of participating fully. I believe that presenting at lunch should be a strategy of last resort, typically to be used after the student has made at least one attempt to present in front of the class, and for the purposes of reevaluation if things go particularly poorly. I also believe, and hope you agree, that no child should be "taking a zero" on any assignment, oral or otherwise. Students who struggle with presentation anxiety can access a number of pre and post-presentation supports to help prepare them for class presentations.
If your child has made this request of me, I may also contact you directly to discuss my concerns, and how to best support your child in gaining the confidence to speak in front of his or her peers.
In English classes, students could be exposed to a variety of resources, including written texts, as well as visual and auditory media. These materials are divided into two categories: core texts, and supplementary texts.
Core texts are mandatory materials that are expected to be covered in each section of a particular course; however, some courses have more than one option for core text from which the course teacher can select. Each course typically has between two to three core texts. They tend to be longer pieces, such as novels or plays. Although assignments may be based on the core texts, student achievement is evaluated based only on the expectations for the course, as laid out in the ministry curriculum documents.
Supplementary texts are typically shorter pieces used to support the study of curriculum expectations or enhance understanding of core texts. These can include short stories, songs, music videos, news articles, speeches, etc.
Lists of core texts can be found in the Course Texts section of each course page. Courses feature many supplementary texts, and these can vary from teacher to teacher, class to class, and between semesters . If you would like additional information on a supplementary text, please contact me by email.
The core texts in each section of East Elgin English classes are chosen with intention. When selecting texts, the department weighs many factors, including difficulty, teaching opportunities, themes, alignment with other core texts, propriety, diversity, etc. Over the past few years we have begun replacing traditional texts with new selections, and each time this has required a long and involved discussion to ensure that new texts are the best choice for our students.
Having students individually reading alternate texts would present many difficulties. Core texts are support materials chosen to enhance the teaching of ministry curriculum expectations, and assignments are therefore tailored to the core texts of each course. Students working from an alternate text would be placed at a disadvantage, as they are unavoidably excluded from the benefits of in-class discussions about the core text, as well as the insights of peers working only from that text. Alternate texts may not align well with assignments, adding additional difficulties.
In later courses, English teachers frequently refer to examples from earlier core texts when teaching new concepts; therefore, students who would have read alternate texts would be at a disadvantage in future learning as well.
If you have specific issues about a course text, I encourage you to contact me by email, so I can engage with your specific concerns.