You Can't Stop Progress (or so say Clutch)

At just five weeks into the new school year, teachers here have been busily printing off 'Progress Reports' for every student they teach. These are computer-generated and contain the grades, and average overall grade, for each students' work to date. Each assignment (homework/ classwork, quiz, test, writing/ book project) has a different weight towards the overall score and the aim is that by the end of the term, students will have multiple grades for each category. By the time I leave, I believe I'll have generated two further reports for each student in additon to a day and an evening meeting with parents.

As an aside, parental involvement is far greater here: each week I have to email several parents directly with updates on and the homework I've set for their child (although the silver lining there is that I get some lovely replies, feeding back the positive impact I've had: it's time-consuming but it can be rewarding) and they can call a teacher's classroom phone directly; no buffering secetary or opportunity to speak at a time convenient to the teacher! I get the impression that parents have far more 'power' here than they do in the UK - they're certainly more actively involved in the minutiae of their child's daily education.

Every student has a guidance counselor, who assigns their classes and generally takes care of the pastoral side of their school career. Guidance also monitor their grades and can tell students what their current attainment levels are. I have therefore had several students approach me - and even email me on my school email - over the past few days, asking what they can do to boost their grades before their reports are printed. Mostly, these are students who have not submitted work: if work isn't in on time, ten points are deducted. And ten more are deducted each day the work is late, up to a maximum of five days, when it receives zero. Receiving zero can seriously impact on an overall grade. Pupils who play sport, such as football, require a certain grade level, so in a school as sports-focused as Northbridge High, it's mainly been students who 'need' a higher grade in order to be able to play this week.

As is the norm in any school at report time, generating them has been a logistical nightmare; not least because our printer has been out of order for some time now and so to print anything, we have to go to the school library. Having used the Moodle application on the school network to 'teach' me how to generate the reports, it took me several attempts to complete all the necessary stages (I had to ensure each included a disclaimer, in addition to the setting-up stages) but I got there in the end and managed to print off all my classes' reports in a relatively pain-free, if time-consuming, process.

Teachers distribute them directly to the students and they aren't in an envelope, so I'm anticipating being challenged over some of the grades tomorrow!