Today is quite spring-like and I’m watching the landscapers clean out the flower bed outside my window. While it may well be snowing when you read this, please try to keep the spring flower bed cleaning image in your mind. The landscapers are vigorously raking out the lifeless, the withered, the non-functioning detritus to make room for new life and growth. By May there will be an abundance of color wending its way through the greenery and the stones. I’ll sit here for seven hours and just stare out my window, drinking in the beauty between swigs of diet coke. Ahhhh. This is the life.
You too can enjoy this same serenity, this same satisfaction with the freshness, the newness, the perfection of spring. No, I am not inviting everyone to my office to gaze out my window. There is only room for one in here. I mean it. Do not come over here! What I am referring to is your vision of your grade screen as a spring garden. Work with me on this one.
If you pull up one of your class grade screens today it may look like a sad post winter garden—dull and full of waste. There are names of people you have never seen in your life interspersed with names of people who used to be sitting and absorbing your wisdom but have since fallen by the wayside, unequal to the challenge of a fifteen week semester. Trying to poke their heads out are your strong students, students who have made it to the end of the semester in some form or another. They may not do well, they may not even pass the course, but they have earned whatever grade you give them. (This must be where the expression ‘stay the course’ came from!)
You can clean up your grade screen by weeding out the deadheads, the withered, the debris left over from attendance drops who never managed to thrive. You can withdraw these students and thus not have to be faced with the dilemma of grading someone you have never met or haven’t seen for weeks or months. You final grade form will only require grades for students who earned them and you will not be tempted to leave a grade blank because you have never seen the student.
Grade screen weeding: It is the right, the noble, the gardener’s way to do things.
Quomodo cogis comas tuas sic videri?
Deborah Benjamin
Registration and Records
04/03/2009 |