Skip to main content

Grades Are In

This morning I finished grading the third and last of my final exams for the semester. This particular class was small and did well overall, so it was easy to take specific pleasure in their achievements.

On some level submitting term grades brings closure to a class. An immediate exception is when a student challenges a grade; occasionally I enter a typographical error into the grade-book and have to correct it. I work hard to avoid it out of pride in my work so it doesn't happen too often. (Other challenges are unfounded and wither quickly; I offer many assessments during the term and do not suffer students to ask for changes to the grading schema after the fact.)

Some classes naturally lead to other math classes. This doesn't happen much with the classes that mainly serve as general studies graduation requirements but past that I'll often have students take a second class with me. Sometimes that's a scheduling requirement (only one section, no way to avoid me) and sometimes that's intentional when the student has more options.

When a student does take me for a second class (or a third, ...) the rapport starts further along.  They let down their guard a bit as do I when they ask for flexibility about due dates, etc. If enough students in a course have had me before the discourse is much simpler; I don't have to start from ground zero quite so much in addressing concepts. 

One of the nicer things is that I can share more of a sense of aesthetics about our content. If you study any discipline long enough, including mathematics, then there should be aspects of it that are appealing, whether it be an unexpectedly useful technique or a pattern that resonates with previous learning.  

On this last final exam (for a course on different kinds of geometries) I asked the students to pick one of the non-Euclidean geometries we discussed as their favorite and explain why. I had told them ahead of time of the question so that they could think it through, and told them truthfully that I would grade their responses solely on their articulation of why they had that preference.

I need to do this more often. Students need to be encouraged to articulate and embrace what they like about the math that we discuss.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Betrayal

I caught a student cheating on a final exam this morning. I had a line of sight on them and watched for ten minutes as they took their cellphone out of their pocket, kept it below their table, typed into it, read it, put it away, then wrote on the exam, repeating this cycle over and over again.  I was a bit surprised as the exam was open notes but this student had not attended many of our classes, just stopping by for exams, and I conjecture that they had no notes to open. I confronted the student who admitted that they had done wrong in an inarticulate non-confessional way. By the afternoon they had signed off on the honor code violation report to avoid further investigation and possible sanctions beyond failing the exam.  Is anger the right emotion to feel now? I had a working relationship with the student, although they had not contributed much to it. They had deceived me in order to gain unwarranted advantage over their peers in the class and that is not right. I don't wan...
1 comment
Read more

Holiday Break

I have been teaching for 37 years now, and I go through many of the same things at the end of the Fall semester each year. There is relief at the completion of a significant task (teaching each of my classes) but there is a good deal of physical and mental weariness and aches. I could sleep for several days straight if not for my sleep disorder. By and large my mind is not very sharp and as an introvert I try to be pleasant with loved ones but am not outgoing at all. With age the feeling of being drained deepens in more and more ways. Of course this is when we have, almost every year, taken a road trip to visit birth families in the Northeast, a full day of driving each way, often involving winter weather far worse than what we are accustomed to in NC. I love my birth family members as well but as with my created family I am weary and not very outgoing. The conversation is rarely about me and my day-to-day life but rather about younger family members and family friends that I do not kn...
Post a Comment
Read more

Collective

Something good happened this week; I was informed of it yesterday when a colleague forwarded an email to me announcing it.  The announcement had to do with our university administration committing resources to something that needed doing; the fact that it had not been done had threatened the safety and work environment of dozens of my colleagues. I was clueless about it until in my job as ombudsperson I heard about it from multiple individuals. 95% of my job as ombudsperson (roughly) is focused on the individuals who come to me, brainstorming about their options and weighing the advantages and disadvantages of each. I've been around my university for over 36 years so I've picked up some knowledge of our system and as a mathematician I have a lot of training and experience in problem-solving. I'm not bad at counseling stressed individuals; professional development at ombuds meetings has helped me a lot with that. 5% of my job as ombudsperson (roughly) is managing upward. The...
Post a Comment
Read more