Grading Freshmen
in Students & Teens ·
Kate Cox2 said:As for this whole "focusing on feelings" thing—I’ve never heard of such a requirement. Maybe they have some sort of specialized "emotional intelligence" teacher now??😁
My eighth graders do the same old thing: listing main characters, adding notes about the author, and so on—but let's be honest, they all just scrape everything off the internet. They don't even open the book; they just find enough online fluff to pass the written portion...
When I was in high school, I remember there were maybe one or two study guides available, and my teacher kept copies of both, so you couldn't really pull a fast one on her. But nowadays, it seems much harder to catch them red-handed...
Good grief, what are you guys even complaining about? So what if she's an "emotional" teacher?
Throughout elementary and middle school—dealing with at least five different teachers who had nothing in common—I was always required to keep reading logs that consisted of my own observations, commentary on characters and their choices, the writing style, the setting, and things like that. In sixth grade, those "feelings" usually boiled down to stuff like: "this part made me mad (here's why)," "this made me happy," or "I liked the ending because..." If you ask me, those logs should actually be mandatory because they help build emotional intelligence, character, and self-expression, plus they deepen your perspective and force you to develop your own opinion...
But hey, since that isn't included in the standard curriculum guides—because those notes are supposed to be totally personal—I guess I agree that we should just ban these teachers from ever talking to kids again, simply because they have the audacity to actually ask children to think for themselves...