Here we sit, on the launching pad of summer. Day one of 84 days of summer vacation for District 203 students starts next Thursday. Kids in District 204 will be celebrating day one of 89 days of freedom the following day.
As much as kids are looking forward to summer, I bet teachers probably are, too, especially those at nearby East Aurora High School.
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In April, school officials learned that in setting up online gradebooks for certain classes, some teachers missed a step that resulted in grade weights for classes to be incorrectly set. As a result, thousands of grades were inaccurate for as many as four years.
East Aurora’s soon-to-be-outgoing Superintendent Mike Popp said the district will change those grades that go up but it won’t be readjusting grades that drop.
“I don’t see any way, as an educator, right now, how I can punish kids for adult mistakes,” he said.
While many students will see grade increases, the real beneficiaries of this mistake are the 14 students who now no longer have to go to summer school.
It’s a doozy of a mistake. In the crazy land of grade obsession, a glitch like this is frustrating and embarrassing to all. But errors are made by humans and we are all human, aren’t we?
Here’s another example of what I mean. One of my kids participated in a fun run where a volunteer inadvertently veered kids off the official race course. After running a block or two in the wrong direction, the kids were told to turn around, retrace their steps and rejoin the official course.
Talking with the race director later, she said, there was a bright side to her error – a chance to teach my son that even “adults make mistakes.”
That’s a lesson he learns frequently with me as his mom. My most recent gaffe was in response to a Spanish quiz grade that read, “Feliz Cumpleanos! 5/14 and a No.”
Grabbing it, I shrieked, “Did you get a 5 out of 14 on a quiz?” No, my son calmly replied. “It says happy birthday, since my birthday is May 14 or 5/14, and the ‘no’ stands for, no, I do not want my Spanish class to sing happy birthday to me.”
Of course, it does.
But what about when kids make mistakes? Just to be clear by mistakes, I don’t mean a big, huge, fat one, if you could call it that, recently made by the University of Iowa student from Naperville who lied about being the victim of a racially motivated crime.
I’m talking about the little ones, like turning in an assignment late or being caught daydreaming in class rather than memorizing rubrics, annotations and math problems.
Richard Wormeli wrote a great article in Educational Leadership – a good summer read for any teacher – about redos and retakes in school. In it, he says, “The teacher who claims to be preparing students for the working world by disallowing all redos forgets that adult professionals actually flourish through redos, retakes and doovers.”
Yes, we do. As adults, we make plenty of mistakes and often bask in the adultness of either owning up graciously and correcting them or shrugging our shoulders and moving on. Why don’t kids have the same opportunity?
Maybe this summer — between classes, camps and test prep sessions – I’ll schedule some time for my kids to make a mistake or two.
So, happy summer, especially to the 14 East Aurora kids who no longer will be spending it in compulsory summer school. I hope they enjoy the break they’ve received and learn a lesson from it, too.
Cathy Janek is a freelance writer who lives in Naperville.
twitter@cathyjanek
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