Also, what do you do with the student who comes to class without their
"ticket", i.e. their summary of what is going to be done that day? What is
their motivation for doing what you've asked? When you grade HW notebooks,
do you grade for accuracy or just attempt? And if its only attempt, do you
check to see if its a reasonable attempt? Thanks for sharing. Sandy
Lillian wrote:
>I can't resist getting into the discussion.
>
>For those of you who don't want to read this, I'm about to talk about my
>conversion to the "assessment" mindset. I had done the evaluation stage
>- as we all have - and found that my students were in really bad shape -
>not learning, not working, not interested.
>
>The conversion came when I realized that no matter how great a teacher I
>though I was, it really was irrelevant if my students were not learning
>anything - so I have made a conscious effort to make them work at least
>as hard as I do.
>
>I have (as about a year ago) put together lots of the ideas I've seen
>here and at conferences about different ways to teach my math classes -
>especially developmental classes. In a nutshell,
>- students are required to do a pretty well defined math autobiography,
>and I give them my own - included is a discussion of their ideas and my
>ideas about doing math.
>- students' ticket to enter my class each day is a summary of what I am
>about to teach, annotated in the margins to say thing like "I never did
>get slope" or "I can do all of this already" or "I was fine with this
>until I got to page 285."
>- as they are turned in I briefly scan them to decide if my lecture for
>the day will be 5 minutes or 50 minutes, and the rest of the class is
>spent doing graded daily work in groups.
>- on test day, I collect homework notebooks to be graded, along with a
>writing assignment telling me what they did to prepare for the test, and
>what will be the hardest part of it for them.
>- on tests there is no partial credit. Students who do 100% of th HW
>problems may earn back up to 50% of the points they miss by writing an
>explanation of why they missed each problem ("I didn't get it" earns no
>credit.) (students who only turn in 80% of their homework only get 80%
>of 50% of their points back).
>
>The result of all this? I never sleep anymore for all the paper
>grading. The students are doing a phenominal amount of work, and saying
>things like, "I never worked so hard in a class before in my life." and
>"I didn't study enough for this test." and "the next time I take a math
>class I intend to work fewer jobs at the car wash." I believe that my
>students now know that I am really interested in what they have to say,
>and as a result they work hard for me.
>
>Do they all pass now? of course not. I share your stress that my
>success rates are awful. But I do believe that my students are putting
>more time and energy int their math classes than ever before -evene in
>the 'good old days' of motivated students. So maybe in the long run, it
>will make a difference. I can only hope that Tom Angelo was correct
>when he recently said that the #1 determinant of student success is
>quality and quantity of study time (#2 was interaction with other
>students about academic work, and # 3 the instructor).
>
>With me getting all this feedback from my students the real battle for
>me is to maintain my standards, and not give in to "this is harder than
>I thought it would be."
>
>Lillian Seese
Sandy Spears
Jefferson Community College
Louisville, KY 40202
sspears@pop.jcc.uky.edu
502-584-0181, ext. 2269
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