Writing my last post made me think of another incident that occurred last week related to student/parent access to grades on the internet. Opening internet access to student grade information for parents did not occur without some objections from faculty.
Unless you are a teacher, you might wonder what is wrong with “grade transparency.” Most objections from teachers revolve around the idea of correcting papers. When grades are transparent to parents (posted on-line) there is an expectation that papers will be graded in a timely manner. This is not in the nature of some teachers. One English teacher complained that they would feel pressure to grade exams after they were given instead of putting them in a folder and waiting for a week or two. I did the car-pool thing with another teacher for a few years a while back, and he was one of the worst at getting things graded. Term grades are usually due on Monday, and the Friday before he would be panic mode over the pile of ungraded assignments and exams on his desk. It was so bad that he would usually spend 24-48 hours without sleep over the weekend trying to catch up. I would pick him up on the Monday grades were due and he would spend the whole drive finishing up filling out the grade sheets on his lap, while bitterly complaining about the deadline. This was before the days of internet grade access so he got away with it. Another teacher argued that posting grades would increase child abuse. I thought he was kidding–but he was serious.
It is much worse for some of the public school students I tutor. One poor Geometry student would have no new grades posted for weeks. When I emailed his teacher asking how he had done on a previous test or quiz I would get an aggravated reply indicating that she had a family and didn’t have time to grade anything now. A talk with a teacher I know in her district informed me that even though their parents had internet access the teachers contract said that no grades needed to be recorded until the end of the quarter. I was told that a significant portion of the faculty never entered grades until the day they were due. I suggested that such an attitude defeated the purpose of internet grade access. My teacher friend told me that this could be negotiated in the next teacher contract but would require some concession from the district in another area. “We will not agree to increase our work load” I was told “unless we are compensated for it in the contract.”
At my school we need to enter new weekly grades by Tuesday; the day before extracurricular eligibility is determined by the administration. I always grade student work within a day or two of collection and record it immediately online. My students are used to taking an exam and finding the grade online that evening. I can access each student/parent account and find out when and how often they check their grades.
In the case of the girl I wrote about in my last entry with the “absence” problem, I was surprised to find that the parent had never accessed the girls records. This explains why she didn’t seem concerned about the failing grade–the parent was unaware of it. The girl has accessed her information 88 times this school year and probably asked the mother to intervene in her absence situation without letting her know about the grade. I took care of that by emailing the mother back to tell her that I took care of the absence and asked why she wasn’t as concerned about her daughter’s grade. Now we will see if attendance is really more important than grades.
The other main objection to internet access to grades is the “helicopter” parent; a parent who hovers around their child, obsessively contacting the teacher about every assignment. I had to deal with one such parent earlier this year. She would email me every time I posted an assignment her child didn’t get an “A” on. I was told in each contact that her child was gifted and could not possibly have gotten a “C” on a quiz. I was asked to recheck each assignment to make sure I didn’t make a mistake in my grading. Each time I reminded the parent that the student had the assignment and she should look at it, and if there was any mistake to let me know. After about 12 emails she stopped contacting me.
One current parent is the worst I have ever encountered. If you look up “helicopter parent” in the dictionary his picture will be there. Since the beginning of the school year he has accessed his daughters grades 653 times. The printed record covers 5 pages and includes almost every day since September when school began. Three days stand out among all the others. On March 19th he accessed her grades 11 times, spending at least 7 minutes online each time! On February 28th they were accessed 14 times, and January 28th , 10 times. The average is 4-5 times each day.
We recommend that parents check their student’s progress once a week.
No comments:
Post a Comment