"Grade Angst?"

I know I am late to the conversation, but I admire Terry Sale's efforts to challenge the ingrained, grade mindset. Tomorrow morning, I should receive an e-mail from one of my students regarding his inability to score well on a writing assignment. He said there is "so much pressure to obtain points or a grade in school that it takes away from everything." He felt as if he could not orate his grade angst. So he agreed to e-mail me about wether the writing grade should be suspended, enhanced, or ignored. He said he wants to learn, revise, and work on the writing so that he can improve his skills, but he is so disenchanted with his own outlook regarding grades. We will see what transpires and if his suggestions will impact his class. Thank you Terry Sale, Mr. Fisch, and others for challenging the grade tradition. I echo Terry Sale: there is always next semester in the educational field.

Willingness To Explore Or Least Resistance Possible?

My freshman students in my English 9 classes had the opportunity to create a document using googledoc. that would allow them to create a culminating project that would demonstrate their idea of "what matters?" regarding several short stories that were read for class. In September, the students labored for three days with the googledoc document. The comments within the googledoc document were limited and lacked direction. As a teacher, I tried to restrain from suggesting anything except that the students had access to podcasting, wikis, photostory3, etc... One class seemed to investigate the stories using some technology, but the other one decided to create boardgames.

For the most part all of the groups of students were proficient, but many of the groups of students did not want to use the technology as a way to discover and enhance their investigation of the subject matter. I am not suggesting that the students are unintelligent or that they don't like to explore, but I was amazed to view their willingness to shun technology in order to experience the "least resistance possible". To this point, I have failed in my ability to excite them about the use of technology versus the completion of a list of questions. However, this experience has forced me to think. As stated by a prior employer, "Failure can lead to success."