My teacher has been out for a few days for her wedding. Because of this she had tons of grading that needed to be done along with many other catch up work. When we came in today she seemed very stressed out so I asked if there was anything I could do to help. She said that the only thing she really needed was grading. So Angela and I sat down and started to grade papers while the students did their daily reading. I was fortunate enough to grade a set of papers that dealt with reading comprehension. I was shocked at how many students missed the answers. One of the questions asked a question that the answer was word for word in the text. Even though this information was easy to obtain many of the students did not put the right answer. In fact the students would randomly copy any sentence out of the text into the section. This really bothered me so I talked to our teacher about it. She told me that often times the kids don't even read the text or the questions so they just write down anything that looks important to them. She also informed me that as a class they would be working on reading comprehension and other mistakes from their worksheet. I don't feel like this is her fault or anyone else's fault but that students at the age are already conditioned to rush through their work so that they can get to the next activity. I feel that testing does this to students. When they take the end of grade test they are often told to finish as quickly as possible so that they can be sure to finish all of the questions. I feel that this is yet another downfall of teaching to a test and of state testing in general.
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3 comments:
I noticed this with our kids too. They would just put down anything random without even reading the question. I think they're given too much too fast that they just finally give up trying.
I think that it's great that you got to grade papers. I feel that is a great experience to see how your students do on various assignments. I agree that students that age are taught to rush through things. It's really sad that things are that way.
I wonder if students feel rushed because of workload. Even in the fifth grade, I think it would be great to give studets one task at a time to complete, moving on only after all students have completed their work. This is only practical if you have a time filler that allows students to work on something else when they are ahead. No busy work!
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