Ahhh....the end of the semester

Hey Everybody:

So the end of another semester has gone. I want you all to know I will miss this class. Some good discussion happened every class and that is rare. I think you will all be great teachers. I am feeling some imposter syndrome but hopefully student teaching will help that feeling dissapate--although talking with some of you in the class room right now isn't making me fell a whole lot better!!!

I am done with my portfolio--yeah. I have an inter-session class that starts Monday, okay don't think about that...

Anyway, it think it is too bad that Missy won't be here to help another group of teachers with the writing process but sounds like she has a good gig at SEMO lined up--yeah for her.

I have learned a lot this semester and though I didn't think I would use portfolios before, now I think I will.

mj

10th post :)

Well, it is Sunday night, and I just counted up my blogs and I have done 9. So, luckily you get to hear from me one last time! :) This is actually a very personal blog, and no one has to comment, but feel free if you like.

I just got in a huge, huge fight with my mom. That is actually why I am at the computer (it is isolated in my basement at home), so I figured, as usual this fight has something to do with education. The fight stems back to the fact that my aunt (who I have told you all about before...) has been living with us for 9 years now, and it is to the point that she can barely do anything on her own now. When I come home on the weekends, I have to chose to hang out with my mom or my dad because we cannot leave Marsha (my aunt) here by herself (just in case you don't listen to me babble in class....Marsha has Down's Syndrome lol). Anyway, although I know my frustration is wrong, and I should not be so selfish....it is still there. Obviously, the fight had many other details, but one of the main arguments was this:

For my mom's own sanity, she started doing everything for Marsha instead of letting her try things on her own. Marsha is 54, so progress is out of the picture, but I do think that by doing everything for her, my mom sped up the degression. When it comes to people with special needs, doing everything for them is not the answer. It may be easier, but since when is the right thing ever easy? One of my favorite quotes is, "sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same." I guess my point is, when it comes to special needs individuals, what do we as teachers feel? I guess my mom's sanity is more important than progressing Marsha's mentality, but I cannot help but wonder. Once again, please do not feel that any of you have to respond.....just thought that it might help me to get it out, knowing that some of you will read.

I hope everyone has a wonderful summer, and it truly has been a pleasure! Hope you guys don't miss me too much! :) Wink!

Sincerely,
Tara Biggs

Finding a balance

Trying to understand the need between peer review and teacher review of a student's work is something that is hard for me. I know that students may learn valuable information from their peers within that review if it is done correctly, but it seems to me as though there is nothing that beats the reviews that an instructor gives to me over my work. Perhaps it is the fact that I am used to writing to please my instructor and the peer reviews I have gone through in my academic past have not been very helpful. What is it that you guys think of peer review? On one hand they are a valuable source of information but on the other they seem very annoying to put your students through. It almost seems like you are asking them to do more work that they might not necessarily get anything out of. I think that I am of two minds about peer review when it is done correctly.

Kids These Days

So I have a "hypothetical" question: If, as a teacher, a student comes back from lunch, and as he/she walks by you on the way to his/her desk you catch a whiff of pot... what do you do?? And furthermore, say the school happens to have open-campus lunch hours where students leave and come back... What if the illegal activities didn't happen on school ground? In the honor of this person's privacy I'll just say that recently he/she was expelled from school for a year and won't even be allowed to go to alternative school until after six months, so he/she will be a year and a half behind in school, all because of the situation above. I'm not saying it's right or wrong... but I will say that another student who stole money from a visiting basketball team during a game only got expelled for 6 months and was able to go straight to alternative school and graduate with the rest of his/her class, although he/she wasn't allowed to walk. So the pot incident was punished more harshly than the stealing incident. I can think of some justifications for that I guess. So my real question is should a teacher really be a police dog and smell all his/her students for signs of illegal substances, and get them all expelled in some master plan to "lighten" his or her workload? I'm exaggerating a little here but I mean seriously. Also, when the student is coming back from off-campus lunch and has no paraphanalia and you have no proof that it happened on-campus or that the student was actually the one smoking the pot, should you still turn them in? This is totally off-topic for this course but I thought it was interesting. I think it's probably one of those school policy situations, but I was just wondering what other peoples' thoughts were. I think that if you're sure beyond a doubt that you should do something about it, but I think sometimes there are so many variables that maybe just giving the student some sort of warning after class when you aren't positive might be ok? Or is that a completely wrong thing to do?

Comments from Mrs. O

Mrs. Oxford sent me an email about the exchange; she said:

My students and I have been having post conferences on their research
papers. During our conference, I have been pulling up your students
comments and grades. I thought that your students would want to know that
they are scoring the papers very closely to my scores. This isn't true 100%
of the time, but most are very close. That is great!!

Sounds like you're doing pretty well!

In an earlier email, she mentioned that her students have really been paying attention to your comments and talking about what you have said about their writing. There have been a few bumps. A couple students felt their SIU reader was being mean by pointing out that they didn't seem to be taking the assignment seriously. Mrs. Oxford and I discussed how students sometimes DO need to be told the truth. She also said it's important to realize that sometimes you will have students that want to only hear sugar-coated fluff even when they do work far below their capabilities. They don't deal well with the truth, but many times these students realize months or even years later how you've pushed them and how your high expectations actually forced them out of their comfort zone in a good way. The only other concern of the students was that they were marked down on some things in their final draft when those things weren't mentioned in their first drafts. Mrs. O said this is something she still has to work on, but there are times when some problems seem to be at the forefront on a rough draft and then other things draw more attention as the first things are fixed.

Overall, very nice work, folks! You should be proud of yourselves.

Giving Grades

Giving grades especially on writing was a difficult thing for me to do. It was so difficult because I felt as if I was judging them. And not having seen what they were working on, the grades that I gave just did not seem like they should have been given at least not some of them. I don't know what else to say except that it was difficult. I don't know what the rest of of did but I found it easiest just to go by the rubric that their teacher had provided yet some of the grades that I assigned with it made me unhappy because they were missing things so I had to deduct points for that. I did see a lot of improvement between the drafts and the final paper though. It was great to see that some of the students did hold valve for my comments.

Finding the Balance

I don't know if anyone else has thought about this, but my grading and comments on papers have changed significantly. When we first began grading essays in class, I would read through essays and mark every gramatical error I could find. I focused on the mechanical side of students writing. But as I finished up my final set of essays, I noticed that I was focusing on the content of the paper. Most of my changes and comments revolved around paragraphing, theses, etc. Now what i need to work on is balancing out my comments. I feel that it is important that students improve on both grammar and content. They are equally important. I think the balance is something I will achieve over time and with practice.