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

Standing Your Corner

I'm a long-term David Simon fan ever since I read his book "Homicide", detailing a year-long embedding with Baltimore homicide detectives. It was clear-eyed about all of the strengths and weaknesses, good reflexes and prejudices of everyone that he met.  I enjoyed the television show that followed that he wrote for, and then of course "The Wire" on HBO and a number of his other shows---only limited by my access to streaming services.  There was a histrionic moment in a later season of "Homicide" where he just let a character vent; a homicide detective who was part-owner of a bar frequented by cops watched a particularly violent drug criminal, responsible for many unsolved homicides, come into his bar with his associates, violating the detective's territory. The detective came around the bar holding a billy club in his hand and loudly discussed his first year as a patrol officer walking a beat. His supervising officer told him that he had a corner a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Car Accident

I was in a car accident a few days ago. There was a stopped car in the interstate and I didn't see it in advance; the car in front of me swerved into another lane and then there it was in front of me. I also swerved but damaged my commuter car, which is old and had many miles on it. The insurance company declared it a total loss.  The damage was where I scraped along the passenger side of my car (and the driver side of the stopped car). I had no deployment of airbags and no damage from my seat belt; no glass on either car broke, so it was a glancing blow if that makes sense. The front passenger wheel was damaged and I could not drive the car very far.  I pulled over to the shoulder and dialed 911. A state trooper made sure I was alright and proceeded to take care of the situation. I was moving slowly, aware that I had had a shock to my system and trying not to do anything to worsen the situation (stepping into traffic when I exited my vehicle, etc.) The trooper took my informa...
2 comments
Read more