Comments

Ahh, 4th quarter warnings.

If you are like me, and many other teachers, grading is your least favourite part of your job.  Comments are even worse, right?

How many of you have an electronic grading system where you can only enter canned comments?  Most often, these are comments that show up on a sheet with numbers next to them.  For example, you type 08 to enter the comment "is a hard worker" or 16 to enter "works hard but struggles."

To me, this exemplifies the factory system.  There is NO opportunity to personalize anything in terms of feedback for the students.  We were talking about personalization and building community two days ago.  Here's the absolute antithesis.  Students are getting exactly the same comments.  There is NO opportunity for  teachers to add comments to help students grow.  None at all.

The worst part is that students KNOW that these comments are meaningless.  They know that they are entered from a comment sheet.  And so, they pay no attention.

These "comments" assign labels, such as "hard worker" or "frequently unprepared."  As much as I used to hate spending time writing out paragraphs about my students, I miss being able to give them this feedback.  So now, we meet individually and I give them that feedback.

I can't even imagine getting these comments on a report card.  Parents have no idea what is going on with their children, and have to "bother" the actual teacher to find out.  While these canned comments are supposed to be "timesaving," in reality they end up making much more work on both sides.

So I think about feedback, about factories, about labels, about the untruths Justin talks about.  How can we, even constrained by factory "comments," give constructive, meaningful feedback to students?  How can we teach them that what they do really matters?