I love tracking.
There I said it. Sometimes people look at me slightly askance when I talk about my myriad tracking systems, which range from the huge wall chart that takes up the entire south wall of my class, to individual student tracking for objectives, Critical Thinking Problems, and Mad Minutes, my own tracking of objectives and CTAs, and most recently, surveys.
Tracking is so great! I mean, I can open up my 12 mb Excel file and tell you exactly who did not understand how to solve percent problems when the problem was arranged such that we were finding the "whole" as opposed to the "part" or the "percent". I get pretty geeked about it. And actually, the "slightly askance" is more like the look at me like I need to be committed.
But this is not a post about tracking. This is a post about the survey.
I give a survey out at least once a marking period (9 weeks) because I want to give my kids a forum for voicing any needs that I am not meeting, and I also want to measure some more vague, non-academic things. I want to know if my kids think math is more or less important after 15 weeks in my tutelage. I want to know if they can tell that I care about their success. I want to know if they are willing to take risks. I want to know if they think they are working hard.
With the data in, I can tell you conclusively that students like my class a great deal more than they did at the end of the first marking period. There was an increase from 57% approval rating to a brisk 66%. On the downside, the "How much do I care about your success?" question dropped from 79% to 76%. And actually, all the rest of the categories saw a decline or no-change. So there was only the one bright-spot.
Well, almost.
One of my students in third period wrote that "What she likes most about this class" was "the laziness aroma."
Now I don't know what this is, but I am fairly confident that this student is not on drugs. That is the first consideration. Since no other students mentioned this aroma, I am guessing that she might have an over-active olfactory sense. Or not.
Any ideas?
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4 comments:
Tracking. Indeed fun. In the business world we call this metrics or analytics. Indeed fun. Having data is so much better than not having data.
Nick had 4 apples. Adam had 2 slices of veggie pizza. If Nick slices one apple and places it on 1 piece of Adam's pizza, how likely is it that the girl was smelling Jake's attitude?
I don't mean that.
Analytics tells me that if I were paid overtime, I would not need to work next year.
Now now Adam. Every once in a while people have to work overtime sometimes. My friend Aaron had to work overtime a lot at a previous job, and to got it reduced by simply saying, "I quit."
I ran across your blog while I was searching something for my grade 4 math class. I am a first year teacher, and I have to admit I am jealous of your tracking. Tracking is my weakness, it seems to be something I'm simply not very good at. It makes assessment and report cards mch more difficult. Congratulations at being geeky about something so fabulously useful. :)
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