Assessment part deux

So, I gave my third quiz the other day, and all but one of my students (RK) failed it. We had some forties, some fifties, and some sixties. No seventies. One 83, and no nineties. This quiz must have been too hard. Right? I’m still not sure. I still think, if they knew everything we covered, then they should have been able to pass this test. And not only passed it, but scored well. But they didn’t. Which means that either: 1. my view of math is skewed and my quizzes do not in fact measure mastery of the material or 2. they just didn’t know the material. And if they don’t know the material, whose fault is that? It must be mine, since every kid can learn. If they didn’t understand, then I wasn’t clear enough. If they didn’t pay attention, I was too boring. If they didn’t do their homework, well, that might be their fault, but maybe I gave them things that were too boring, or they didn’t do it because they didn’t understand it because I didn’t teach it well enough.
Part of the problem was that I didn’t sit in on all my co-teacher’s lessons. I was making LP’s in the library a couple of times, and so I wasn’t clear on exactly what she had taught, how far she had gotten, and how clear the kids were on the material. And for whatever reason, I know my lessons before this quiz were not my best. Partially, it was that we tried to do too much too fast. My most difficult task, aside from CM, will be trying to remember what it is like to struggle through and first learn these things that seem so automatic and intuitive to me now. So the quiz was bad. I decided to let them take it home Thursday night and fix things for extra points, thinking that they will at least learn something that way. I told them how important it was. Two out of eight kids brought it back the next day. They both passed it.
But one other student, RH, came in that morning and said she hadn’t corrected it, because she didn’t know how to do it, and her mom didn’t understand it either. I spent some time going over the quiz with the whole class. I had a whole period, since we had somehow messed up the schedule, and it was the last day of school, and so I sat down at one of the desks with them all and with one of the small white boards, and we went through the quiz. This was the best lesson I taught all summer. No plan, no thought. But I was sitting down with the kids, in their desks, at their level. Somehow, I was still unambiguously the teacher, somehow even more in charge then when I stood up at the front of the room and glowered. I started off just working with RH and BM, since they had been asking me about the quiz, and I didn’t think I was actually teaching that period. Once the bell rang and no one else stepped up, I decided I would just keep going, and by then everyone else had just gathered round, on their own accord. When we went through the Pythagorean Theorem problems, they really struggled with that. RH said “Can you just give me one to do up on the board?” I gave her one, and then everyone else was asking for one. I had all eight kids either up at the board or working at problems on small white boards; they were everywhere, asking for markers, calculators, erasers, asking me to check their answers, but mostly they were asking for more problems. I struggled to keep pace with them all, find markers that actually would write, and come up with new triangles for them to practice on. I was relaxed, I was nice, I was everything I wasn’t when I was videotaped, and it felt great. I only wish I had done it before I quizzed them and that I knew how to replicate that experience and extend it to a classroom of 25 or thirty. Since I’ll have 94 minute periods, I might be able to just sit down with groups of kids, while the others are all working on something, for 15 minutes or so. If I broke my class into three groups, then taking them for 15 minutes apiece would be pretty reasonable, and I would still have half the class to do whatever I wanted with them. The main question is what would I don with the other two groups while one was working. I’ll keep thinking about that.
The post-test was another amazing experience. The kids got the same test they took at the beginning of the year, and bombed it. No one passed it – maybe RK, but no one else. They all were hovering in the 40’s again, or lower, even despite the partial credit. I wondered why we had spent so much time on geometry and algebra when the kids still couldn’t round. Seriously, they lost the most points on rounding, and long division. That might have had to do with time – none of them finished, and my mentor teacher told me time was up, so I had to collect them, which was really hard for the kids.
About half of my class failed summer school (3 or 4 out of 8). Even the smart ones. When my mentor teacher told me the list, I repeated one of the names “WA? He’s so smart.” My mentor teacher shrugged and said he’s lazy. I guess he’s right. But we didn’t give our kids fair warning. Because the mentor teacher kept the grades, and the first years were the only ones teaching for the last two weeks, the communication that needed to be there wasn’t, and so I never sat down with one of those students and said “RH, it seems like you’re really having a hard time with some of this stuff. You’re really close to failing right now, and neither of us wants that. What can I do to help you do better in class.” And after we went through the normal, annoying things, like “you could make the tests easier” or “give less homework” we could have come to an agreement, and tried to work towards passing, when there was still a week left, even when there was still a day left before the big test. I know I’m going to have kids who fail, and I know I won’t be failing them, but that they will fail themselves, and I’ll be fine with that. But I feel like I failed these kids by not letting them know where they were and where they needed to be. Had I done that, had I just estimated their averages and sat down for ten minutes with each of them, just written a note, maybe one of those who failed might have passed and made into into 8th grade, on his own. Not because I gave him any gifts, but because he did what he needed to do. I don’t want to fail any of my kids, and I’ll always let them, and their parents know if they are ever in danger of failing. After the first two quizzes, in the fall, anyone below a 75 will get a call. I will have enough kids who fail themselves, and who have already had plenty of teachers and other people in their lives who fail them, that I do not want to be the one who fails them, no matter how many F’s I have to give out.