(no subject)

[the_rck]

I wonder if the culture around St Patrick's Day will have changed at Cordelia school now that there are so many new students? The school is, sadly, much, much whiter than it used to be. In years past, nobody paid any attention to St Patrick's Day at the school-- Nobody got pinched for failing to wear green (tradition when I was in school). I assumed, at the time, that that was at least partly because of the sheer number of foreign students at the school. Now the school is nearly three times the size it was, and most of those students are middle class white kids. I definitely wouldn't mind if the pinching stayed gone, but who knows? I suppose Cordelia can tell me when she gets home this afternoon.

I slept for about an hour after Cordelia left this morning. Normally, I don't go back to sleep, but I did today. I dreamed fairly intensely, too, nothing particularly interesting but it's sticking in my memory in bits and pieces.

I wrote about 700 words yesterday. I think this section goes before the introspective stuff that I wrote earlier. This section switches to a point of view character I haven't used much. It will require considerable tweaking-- At the very least, I need some description of the space where the scene occurs. Right now, it could be happening in empty space.

Yesterday, I tried Stash's ginger peach green tea. I goofed in preparing it and poured boiling water over the tea bag instead of waiting a bit for the water to cool, so I don't know how the tea should have tasted. It wasn't bad as it was, though. Still, I had higher hopes for its flavor based on how the tea bag smelled when I opened the packet, so I don't know. I do like both ginger and peach in my tea in general.

I've got to figure out some place to put the clean silverware until Cordelia can put it away after school today. I told her to do it last night before she went to bed, but she was watching The Voice and forgot (and I forgot to remind her). Right now, I've got enough dirty dishes to fill the dishwasher, and I'd like to run it while it's just me at home. Doing it once Cordelia comes home runs into trouble with her and Scott needing to shower, and I do have a load of laundry (towels) that I'd like to wash. At any rate, right now, the clean silverware is in the dishwasher's silverware rack, sitting on the kitchen counter. If I'm going to wash the dirty silverware, I need that rack.

I don't know what's going to happen with metanews. We're down to two people trying to keep everything going, and we need at least three (preferably four or five. Having three means dropping a bunch of things). Right now, we don't have anyone to cover half of the blogs we follow or to cover AO3 or LJ. Both of us who are still on the team spend a couple of hours a week link finding, and I don't think either of us has the time to spare to take on another two or three hours a week every week. Well, I technically do have time. I just don't think I have the energy. The other person simply doesn't have the time. They have suggested that we might go to posting biweekly instead of weekly, but I don't think that would solve the basic problem because there'd still be every bit as much work needing to be done.

The school has changed how they're doing grades. I don't think I understand the new system at all. Cordelia should be bringing home grades today, so I guess I'll see if I can figure it all out. The email from the school said they're trying to use "standard based mastery reporting of the common core state standards", whatever that means. I don't think it will have a big impact on Cordelia as she does quite well on her school work, but I'd like to understand the criteria better. I should really be better about checking Cordelia's progress on the district's website for that purpose. Sometimes, she misses assignments, forgetting to turn them in, and one of her two teachers has a tendency to make errors, either not entering grades for assignments people have turned in or entering the wrong numbers. Both can have a major impact.

Comments

[lady-of-mists.livejournal.com]

I know what standards based grading is down here. Basically, if you can show mastery of the skill at any point in the semester/school year (depending on the length of the class), you can receive credit for it like you knew it on the day of the assessment. In essence, it is re-dos and make-up work allowed at any point to show mastery of the skill -- for instance, if you didn't do an assignment, you can turn it in later for credit. If you didn't understand what was going on when it was test day, but you learned it next week, you can retake the test.

Now, that's the way it works on a high school level in another state. I don't know if your school is more proactive about looking at later tests and seeing if the student was able to incorporate an earlier standard that she didn't do well on at that point in time. It may be something that you would need to discuss with the teacher/administration to see if they have a cut-off for making up assignments or something like that.

[the_rck]

I don't think that's what standards based grading is here. The thing they sent home said something about rating everything on a scale of 1-4 with 1 meaning the kid absolutely doesn't get it and 4 meaning the kid goes above and beyond in completing assignments (a 4 sounded nearly impossible to get). I'm not sure how that relates to the A, B, C grades that they also do.

[evalerie.livejournal.com]

When we have a missed chore that is getting in the way, I will often announce that I've done a "chore swap" with the kid in question. "You didn't set the table and the family needed to eat dinner, so I swapped chores with you and now instead tonight it is your job to put out the garbage," -- stuff like that.

I haven't yet seen many report cards that I was happy with, but I think the kind the school is sending will have a list of a bazillion skills that the state expects students to master this year, and probably numbers or some other way of indicating whether the child has encountered that concept, and whether they have little, medium, or a lot of understanding of it -- probably numbers 0 through 4 or random letters for each option.

We have had so many report cards where clearly teachers spent a *long* time on each child entering stuff like that, and I skim over it or skip it entirely and just read the written text part where the teacher describes how the child is doing -- so this type of report cards seems to me like kind of a big waste of the teachers' time. I keep hoping that it *is* meaningful to some parent somewhere, since it does seem like so much work for the teacher to write it.

[the_rck]

What I did with the clean silverware was to put it in a cup on the counter. Then, last night, I had Cordelia put away that and the stuff that had just come out of the dishwasher.

Cordelia's teachers don't write comments, so the numbers are all we have. I'm afraid I skim over them, too. Mostly, she had fours, with just a couple of threes under social skills. I wish they did write comments. They don't really have that many kids to grade as there are only 47 sixth graders, so I'd expect it to be more possible than if they had more than 100.