Education, Math, and More with Mr. Allison

Some may think the (and students) means I consider student needs secondary behind teachers' needs. Not true. I wrote it like that because most students don't really understand what they NEED most, and what they need most isn't necessarily what they want out of school.  The classroom is different today than it was five years ago. When we sent kids home in 2020 and told them to hide under the covers and we'd give them an A...for doing absolutely nothing...for learning absolutely nothing...for nothing...nothing, when that happened, a shift in expectations occurred. And it hasn't shifted back yet, at least not everywhere. Teachers (and students) need that to shift back, and they need it now! Kids got used to having great grades for doing almost no work. Kids got used to having a high GPA without learning. To make things worse, when they came back in the fall of 2020, we sent them home for two weeks at a time when they heard the word Covid in the hallways. Over and over ...

 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...