Education, Math, and More with Mr. Allison

It's that time of year again in education. The end draws near. At my school, we started the final quarter of this school year last week. A lot of stuff comes with that. Seniors are almost finished, really finished. Everyone--teachers and students--has summer on the mind. Prom, scholarships, letters of recommendation, graduation, testing, and a ton of other stuff that all comes at the end of the school year. Most of it exciting and fun. But not all of it. Some kids are moving after the year ends and may be kind of nervous and anxious about the unknown. Seniors are leaving the world they've known for 13 years and struggle with uncertainty too, even while they're excited about the prospects. Teachers, as relieved as they are to see the light at the end of the tunnel, this can be a stressful time too. Teachers' contracts are year-to-year, so everyone is wondering if they're contract will be renewed. Testing is stressful for teachers too, since results are often tied to ...

 I saw a Facebook post this week where a parent stated, "Grades are not a measure of knowledge, but a measure of compliance." Unfortunately, I think there is a lot of truth to that in our culture today. My goal with grades is the opposite, though. Grades should be representative of what a kid knows. Years ago, the math department where I work established test scores as 75% of a student's grade. I cannot speak for other teachers, but this has worked well to help kids LEARN the material, instead of counting on lots of completion-graded homework and classwork points to keep their grades high, even when their knowledge is lacking.  Take a class with 1000 points possible in a grading period, where students take three 100-point tests. If a teacher grades everything but tests for completion, a student could turn in every paper with every answer wrong and "earn" 70% of all the possible points. In most schools today, 70/100 is a C. Even if this student scored a zero on e...