grades

mrC’s 7th Grade Report Card

November 17, 2011
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mrC’s 7th Grade Report Card

Of course my parental units also had to visit for my fittieth. (I tell the kids that as a certified English teacher, I have a license to make up and misuse words. Most of them believe it.)  And here’s Mom sporting my 7th grade report card from the school year 1973-1974. So let’s deconstruct this “artifact.”   First it comes in one of those tight-fitting envelopes with the little curved notches in the top for ease of sliding the card out. Mom didn’t spring for a yearbook that year, so the envelope has a bunch of signatures and a couple of “see ya next year’s.” It’s also signed by Dean Martin, right above my best friend’s signature. I don’t remember Deano hanging out at Mel’s. I think that’s the logo for the diocese. We were the Saints, but we didn’t have a logo. 1. Old school typewriting, typed by our school secretary (mom of a classmate, and as scary as the nuns). St. Mel was St. Patrick’s cousin. 2. Dunno why the COWARD is in all caps. She does that on the inside too. Now, let’s look inside. 1. There’s that all caps thing again. Must be intentional. 2. Knowledge of Religion. Catholicism from

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“Until you have kids here.” (Not already?!)

May 19, 2010
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In my annual Back to School Night spiel to parents I always talk about what a Disneyland we have here. I worked for two years in da hood before I landed this job, and I’ll be here forever. “Like I say to the kids, ‘I’ll be here until you have kids here.’” I’ve been saying it for years (17), but I thought I still had a quite a few years before it actually started happening. (Our Mrs. G has been there for awhile.) But the other day, a kid (not one of mine) came up to me in the quad and said, “Do you remember a kid named ‘Carl Mayer’?” “I’ve actually had two. Which one are you talking about? The one from way long ago, or maybe, five or six years ago?” “Way back in the day.” “Ok. That was maybe ’94 or ’95? I don’t know. So? Don’t tell me you’re another cousin or something.” “He’s my dad.” Well then. I did the math. It turns out it was ’94 when I had Carl, so he became a dad at 16. Hrrrm. In a related incident…I was finally starting to clean out one of my old file cabinets.

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Grandma’s Hose

March 17, 2010
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Just a little circle-time sharing… One of my classes just loves to share. I keep telling them I don’t care, but…they keep sharing anyway… I’ve had to institute the “WTP?” rule. What’s the point? “Last night, I ate Chinese food.” “Thanks for sharing. And the point is…?” “Ummm. I thought the Kung Pao chicken was tasty. But it was realllly hot.” “Still waiting…” “Ummm. The point is…if you eat Chinese food, you should probably order Kung Pao chicken, but make sure it’s not too hot.” sigh. But every now and then, they share too much, even for them.  One period a day has an extra 10 minutes for school bidness and handing out paperwork and etc. Any extra time, they want to spend sharing. A while back, during “circle time,” we were talking about nicknames. “I have a nickname for pretty much every one of you.” “What’s mine?” “You don’t want to know.” “I hate nicknames. In elementary school they called me Pi_ er Diaper.” (I swear, I still can’t even type it without cracking up. That just rolls off the tongue.) After everyone in the room had expired from laughing continuously for five minutes, I managed to say, “You

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528. (Do the Math II.)

September 30, 2009
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The volume of e-mail from parents this year has been unprecedented. Dunno what’s different this year. Actually, I think I just figured it out. PowerCheese. Sorry, PowerGrade. I finally made the switch after being a Making the Grade fan for years. Our school bought a site license years ago, before the current IST dictatorship, and they gave us free upgrades for life! (We also had to take things to the superintendent to keep the right to keep using MtG when the district made the switch to Powerschool/Powergrade. Oh, that was ugly.) Anyway, with MtG, our site has been posting grades online for years. I made the switch because they finally upgraded the software to a point where it was (barely) good enough. And with IST wiping our computers every year, and then (grudgingly) giving us an outdated version of MtG on the network, and since we can’t download at school, it’s a pain to get everything working again in the fall. So I went to the dark side. I started last year for the second semester, so this is the first year I have gone with PG from the beginning. It’s a clunky, fairly lame gradebook program, whose main virtue

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“But he’s been working so hard.”

September 13, 2009
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Dagnabbit. I did it again. You’d think after all these years, I might know better. But they say that the longer you teach one grade, the more you become like the students that you teach. Anyway… I posted grades online too early. Again. Every year, since I’ve been been posting grades online (1999), I’ve had an internal conflict (literary term!) about when to post them. Two weeks in? Three weeks? Later? From the git go? It seems there’s a fine line between posting too late: “Why didn’t I hear about this sooner?!” and too early: “OMGOMGOMG! She’s never had  a grade like that before! We need a conference!” (This because, out of maybe 5 grades, one of them is a zero.) Pretty much every year, I go too early, and this year was no exception. More than a dozen e-mails by Saturday, after posting grades on Wednesday. All of them of the OMG variety. Also, a lot of this: “But she’s been trying so hard.” Many kids and parents still have to be disabused (isn’t that a great word?) of the notion that effort is part of the grade. I put a token effort factor into the KBAR response rubric

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Random Featured Post

“How cute. Like hobos…” (Also: Hank Williams.)

Wednesday. Vocabulary Pretest. Talk of facades and irony. Both figure large in The Outsiders. More on that later. Today I have more insight from my friendly class. We’re reading chapter 4 (the death of Bob, Dally helping with the getaway, jumping the train out of town), and we get to where Dally is telling Pony and Johnny to “hop the 3:15 freight to Windrixville.” We pause and talk about how it’s only been less than 36 hours (book time) since the beginning. They find it hard to believe until we start to do the timeline. Figure that Pony gets out of the movie in the late afternoon, and gets jumped and saved. Pony and Johnny and Dally go to the Nightly Double the next night, and it’s now 3:15am that same night. Then I make sure they know that a freight is a train. And one girl says, “How cute. Like hobos…” Hobos maybe. Cute? [Audio clip: view full post to listen] Why Don’t You Love Me Like You Used to Do? When the boys run to find Dally at Buck Merrill’s house, Pony offers a brief description of Buck that ends with, “…he was out of it. He dug [...]

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Mr. Coward has been teaching on the beautiful central coast of California since 1989.

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Recent Comments

  • mrC commented on It’s Go Time!@Sarah-Most excellent! Keep up the good work, and don't let any of them talk you out of it. Glad to hear your kids recognize the value too. Fight the good fight!
  • Mrs. M~ commented on Illin’Feel better soon! There is nothing worse than being at school and trying to be "on" when you feel like death.
  • Sarah commented on It’s Go Time!I just came across your blog...I am a second year teacher and I am currently reading The Outsiders aloud to my seventh graders. I read it to them last year, too. I catch a lot of criticism for reading it to them...but they LOVE to have me read to them. I actually had a group
  • joan commented on Illin’I'm on day two of out-with-the-crud. I needed the rest. Hope you're in tip top shape by Monday!
  • mrC commented on “The Sub Used One of Your Sticks!”That one oughta be strung up like they used to do to horse thieves.
  • Heather commented on “The Sub Used One of Your Sticks!”The last sub I had left no note at all and broke the arm of my spinny chair by leaning back in it so far that he fell in the floor. The kids all said he was the best sub ever. I politely asked the school secretary to never have him sub in
  • mrC commented on The Future of Space Travel@Heather: Gawd I hate that. I think I even posted about it awhile back. @Kelli: This reminds me of high school. I went to a Jesuit high school (all boys) and for our Friday football rallies, we would import cheerleaders from other schools to be a part of the rally. And the girls would always begin
  • Heather commented on The Future of Space TravelMy eighth graders just have the habit of prefacing every question with, "I have a question." And announcing "I'm done" when they complete an assignment.
  • Kelli commented on The Future of Space TravelIs it bad that I sometimes start my stories with "Okay, so...."...? I guess the kids have rubbed off on me. Sigh.
  • Kelli commented on Blogging the Scoring Session (Part I)Ugh! Been there. I have been to those "Scoring and Rubric" type meetings in two different states now... Not fun, and not entirely informative, either.
  • Meg commented on No Groove Yet (Also: The Giver and No Homework Returns)There was a district I student taught in that hand the no fail policy. I child could not be held back a grade, even if they did absolutely nothing the whole year, until they were in high school. It took most of the middle schoolers about 3 seconds to realize they didn't have
  • Kelli commented on No Groove Yet (Also: The Giver and No Homework Returns)You know, that whole "no-zero" policy goes hand-in-hand with the "no-failure" or "no-retention" policy, and my school district is a definite contributor to this madness. I can understand the desire to stop giving zeros and MAKE the kids do the work (giving countless opportunities until successful), but I have been in a situation where
  • commented on Obligatory Santa VideoWe have an unofficial "no zero" policy. It takes a little extra effort on the teacher's part to get all of the students to complete their assignments but we have made it work. The thing that was most helpful was instituting a "homework detention" that is separate from discipline detention. If a

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