Just as an FYI, though this info is over 20 years old.
The correlation between College Entrance Exams (ACT etc) and college success was about .6. The correlation between high school GPA and college success was about .1. I’m not kidding.
The whole grading in high school is completely distorted and I don’t blame the teachers. It is because of administrations and communitees trying to look good.
I could have planted the flag and defended it…and been destroyed. Since I didn’t feel like a professional and wasn’t treated as a professional, why should I ‘defend the ramparts?’ Like Manda said, I wasn’t the guardian of the gradebook. You have to choose what is important and put your energy into that.
Silenus and Manda JO, there were years in my 26 where I could do exactly what I wanted, as long as I was teaching my subject and controlling the classroom. Things have changed. Believe me, for the last 5 years, there was a constant game between the central office and my department. We did give them the bare minimum on the BS paperwork to get by- they kept increasing the load for all departments. Now, they want detailed lesson plans turned in to the principal every Friday for the next week, and by detailed, I mean accounting for nearly every minute the kids are in your room. 'Round here, not doing this will, I repeat will get you fired.
Also, I credit slack grading by H.S. English teachers for the shock I got when I saw my grade on my first English 102 theme (SAT grades let me skip English 101).
I have heard this is increasingly the trend. Hopefully, my district will remain too disorganized for it to ever materialize here, and then after a while the trend will pass.
There’s a difference between slack grading and being careful to grade what really matters, and no more. For example, once a week I read a short piece of philosophy to my kids. Now, the point of the lesson is to expose them to some new ideas, and, even more, to expose them to the conventions and structure of archaic language. In order to make sure they pay attention, I insist they annotate the passage as we read. Now, as a young teacher I would have come up with an “annotation rubric” that divided annotating into 5 different criteria and had a description of what was considered “exemplary”, “good”, “adequate” and so on for each. I then would have spent 5 minutes on each paper, looking to see to what degree they met each criteria.
But if I did that, I could only do it once a semester, and we’d lose all the other works we could have read–along with all the other chances they had to improve over the last time. So now I just eyeball those annotations, and I bet I’m within 10% of the grades I would have gotten with my rubric.
I don’t think that’s slack. I think it’s maximizing the thing I want–lots and lots of exposure to complex texts–at the cost of something I don’t really care about–“ideal” annotations.
Heh. This thread reminds me of one of the best teachers I ever had, my senior English teacher. Before I had him, my grades were always in the upper 90 percents in every other class I’d ever had. His tests… well, there were tests where, if you made above a 70, you were one of the two people in the class who did so, and it was an automatic A+. I’m not sure he even looked at the numerical grade when assigning letter grades – as far as I could tell the mean and standard deviation of the numerical grades we’d get as a class on any given tests were kind of random – it was “do you know the material, and can you analyze it?”
Like I said: one of the best teachers I had in high school, and without him I would have been lost in English classes in college.
Agreeing with the person who said, pick the non-ed major and include the teaching credits. You want to major in something that the students you teach will WANT to be in your class: a foreign language other than Spanish, a hard science, agriculture, or European history are examples.