PLN 20

Once more, I scrolled through the teacher blogs on my school website, (no, I still have not escaped from my habits of monotony) and decided to check Ms. Crosby's blog. Her most recent post, Grading Practices talks about how students don't take the time to look at specific categories to see where their learning needs improvement, which can be harmful to their overall grade. Since this is a habit I myself have formed, I decided to comment on Crosby's blog:

As a student, I will admit that often times, I focus less on the details and more on the overall grade. I don’t concern myself with looking over categories to see where I need improvement. As long as I see an A staring back at me from the computer screen, I don’t particularly care how I am in specific aspects of the class. Although this is a terrible habit that many students face, I am happy to say that when the grade is not an A, I immediately set out to find the root of the problem. I know that a lot of students do this. My friends and I often talk about how certain things affect our grade and when we focus on those, grades improve.

Honestly, it’s tedious to look through every category of every class, but your right; we need to focus on the details. Our overall grade may be excellent, but that may just be because we participate in class. Our writing skills might stink and we wouldn’t even know until we fail our final paper. Sometimes, we students don’t realize that you place things in categories for a reason, and not merely for your own enjoyment. Grades are set up the way they are so we can pinpoint the exact problem in our learning. You can’t fix a problem if you don’t know its there. Perhaps talking to students about different categories and how they affect grades would help students take more initiative in their learning.
-AvereeL