Friday, November 04, 2011

Participate

It was a long day, but it's finally over, thank goodness.  And for being such a long day, it wasn't quite terrible.  I was smart enough to plan two quizzes for the day (restful for today, not restful for the weekend) and low key activities for a few classes.  Either way, I was completely wiped out by the end of the day.  I can't wait for my coworker to come back so that I can have my free period back!

In other news, I was reviewing my quarter grades last night, and I realized I only had a few participation grades.  We count that as 20% of their average, and I feel like maybe I didn't do my students justice in that department.  Well, not maybe. I monitor their participation all the time, I just rarely ever translate that monitoring into a grade.  Hopefully there won't be any trolling parents out there who check the online grade book and realize how much I faltered in that area.  Any suggestions for getting more participation grades written down?

2 comments:

Margaret said...

Yeah, quiz days are easy until you have to grade and record all of them. Ugh!! I do a participation/presence grade which is 100 points every couple of weeks. I mark on the seating chart if they are participating/not doing squat/ following the plan/conversing and then translate that into an assessment.

Zaiene said...

If you get desperate for, you can get the students to self-evaluate their participation and each other's (or a random 5 other students), to flesh out the data you're relying on for grading. (Could be as simple as a rating out of five.) Even if you don't rely on it, it can help for those students you're not sure about, because you could get a feel for the consensus in the class.