My kids can do anything

Today I gave my second quiz. My first I gave about a week and a half ago, although it seems to be already in the far distant past. I had only taught two lessons at that point, and the quiz I gave them was far to easy (granted, it is seventh grade math). It didn't seem right. Assessment as a motivating factor should act either as a reward and a consequence. A high grade, praise, a spot on the wall of fame, or Ace Award (an award given to a student who gets a perfect score on a test or quiz, something my calc teacher did in high school) should be a reward for putting in the time and studying, and if students can come in and get great grades with little effort, like the two students who scored 103 on my first quiz did, the reward starts to seem meaningless, since it was achieved with little or no exceptional effort. A poor or failing grade should act as a consequence, but if everyone is already far from failing, then the negative aspect of assessment as motivation is also failing.

For my second quiz, I decided to make it quite a bit harder. I made it a good three pages, with no goofy extra credit points (I offered one extra credit point out of 140 for finding the square root of 1369). I tried to set it up in such a way that I had several questions on each of the topics we covered, and a little more than 4/5 of the questions could be answered pretty easily if you knew the concepts, and the last fifth were questions (one or two on each subject) that required a little more thought than just "I remember rule X so I just need to write Y".
The class was not happy. One of the girls was frustrated and feeling like she didn't know anything. Another, Samantha, was more angry about the quiz, and probably also about the detention she got yesterday (which I overheard led to her mom grounding her- yeah parents). Regardless of whether she was still steaming over the detention or whether she was mad at me for making such a hard quiz, she was close to tears after about 20 minutes of it. A third girl, Megan, who is about three feet tall, with glasses and the cutest little southern voice, had been at a funeral the day before and thus had been absent (excusably) and also seemed to be under a lot of outside stress today, with the funeral being an obvious source. This girl had missed all the information about prime numbers, GCF and LCM, which made up significant chunks of the quiz. Now, Megan is generally a really responsible, although really shy, little girl, and she was getting really upset about the quiz. Her hand was up several times, asking me what to do about the questions relating to the stuff we covered when she was out. For one definition, I told her to just write "I wasn't here" and for the others, I told her I understood, that I would remember when I was grading that she hadn't been here, and that she should think of them like bonus problems, but she was still flipping out. I told her to look at all the other questions she had been able to answer, and told her that she would be fine. I told her to take deep breaths.
About 3 minutes before the bell, everyone but Megan had finished the quiz, and I had them all trying, individually, to figure out the Fibinacci sequence. I pulled Anthony, our class joker, to the side. He's actually one of the smartest guys in the class, and he was actually getting pretty close to figuring out the sequence. I asked him if he would do me a favor. "What you want?" "Anthony," I said " Remember the fraction song?" Nods head. "I want you to do an interpretive dance to the fraction song for me." Eventually, with a bit of convincing, he and another student, Terrance, agreed to do a dance. The whole class sang, and those two clowns got to dance, and I thought it made everyone lighten up a bit, so they'd have that out of their system and be ready for next period.
It didn't work for Megan, however. After the bell rang, she finally hands me the quiz, and says "Golly Mr [blank]" and just shakes her head. I assured her it would be fine, but I could tell neither my reassurances or the interpretive dance had lifted her spirits.
At the end of the day, Samantha asked me what she had scored on the quiz. I told her I hadn't finished grading them yet and that I'd bring them back on Monday. Megan, Leaning against the wall, blurts out, in her little voice - You probly flunked it like I did - and she slid down a little lower along the wall. I felt bad about the quiz. I felt like I had made it way too hard for them, that they'd all failed, and that all I had accomplished ammounted to a big kick in the teeth for their confidence.
I was even more upset when another teacher, during the test, told Megan she would go over the questions with her after lunch. Fine idea. My class. Go through me first. I wasn't really excited about getting pulled into a good cop bad cop game. Then, when they were working on it after lunch, the teachers says, in front of the class, "Mr. [Blank], this test is hard." Implying, obviously, that it was too hard for my kids. No one should ever tell my kids that something is too hard for them. Ever. They are not smart kids, and they have enough people telling them they are too stupid, too uneducated, too far behind. Aside from that, I felt like it undermined my authority in the classroom. I gave a quiz. That's it. I was mad. I understand that it's hard to see a kid be frustrated and upset, and we're all here because we want to help kids, but this was the wrong time and the wrong way to try to help. My kids can do anything, and in private, I'll talk about things they struggle with, or things that that I will really need to pound in to their brains, because they won't get them at first. But they can do anything.
Turns out, I was right. I just graded the quizes. The mean and median scores were 81. No one failed. The range was from 74 to 95. Megan got an 80. So maybe it was too easy. The way I grade, pretty much every problem is worth three points, you get one point if you try, two if you're on the right track, and three if you get the right answer, which keeps things sane for me as a grader and gives the incentive to show work, which keeps them from slipping up on the dumb stuff. If I didn't give partial credit, kids would have failed, maybe all of them, but I really believe that the grade should be based on what they know, and if they know how to do a problem, but momentarily forget how to subtract 4 from 7 (it's amazing how often this happens), they should get half-credit for it.
So, that is my rant. I haven't figured out about assessment yet, about what it should be. Kids should take a test and feel smart. Kids don't feel smart when they do easy things. I spoke with a kid from someone elses class today in lunch. Says he doesn't learn anything, says he knows everything they learn. He doesn't feel smart when he gets taught it again, even if he gets 100s on the test (especially if everyone else would be getting hundreds as well). Kids want to be challanged, they want to twist their brains around problems. That's the reason why kids crowd to the board after lunch to try to find the roots of some huge squares (I think 5041 is the biggest one I've given them yet). I have taught them some dumb things, and assigned them some stupid work, and gave them that first dumb quiz, but I'm learning. I still don't have a clear philosophy about assessment, but I'm finding out a few things about it. Success has to be just within reach, and failure should be always snapping at your heels.


(All names are ficticious. My students are way too cool to appear in this blog.)