Today I helped my teacher grade posters. Nothing makes my inner organized, logical, math lover want to kill herself more than grading artistic things like posters. POSTERS?!?!
The assignment was a really interesting one. The students were supposed to find images to represent the different Ages of Man (Golden Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age, Heroic Age, Iron Age. If you don't know these, don't feel bad. I took notes during the presentations because I had no idea what they were!) The idea was for them to represent the different characterstics of each age. All in all, kind of a neat project. It's useful for the students because they have to really think about the characteristics of the different ages and it's creative and fun to watch/listen to others present their posters.
Grading them however, sucked. Yes. I said it. It sucked. How the eff do you do that? Grade people on creativity? I could easily place all the people didn't meet the required number of pictures or who included things that were factually innacurate into a grade range. But after that, things got murky. By the end I really wanted to just slap random grades on there and be done with it.
Luckily, I was not solely in charge of the grading. My cooperating teacher was there making the final decisions and commenting on what she thought put some people in the A group and some in the B. She allowed me to see her process and this made me want to kill myself a little less. (I did beg her to leave the other classes for tomorrow because I didn't want to do it anymore. There is only so much I can take.)
Again, another really interesting experience with grading. It's extremely hard to stand in front of work that students have done and decide which ones are better and which ones don't quite make the cut. And it seems vastly unfair. Some kids didn't have printers or computers at home. Some didn't know how to draw. Some didn't have the money or means by which to get a poster to begin with. How does all of that factor into the grades you give and the assignments you create? I have no idea.
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