You CAN Teach An Old Dog New Tricks!

  I'm taking a class online.  It's not the first online class I've taken, but it's the first one that's forcing me to explore all the internet resources available to teachers.  I've come to the conclusion that a teacher who is super savvy with technology and the internet wouldn't have to be all that smart in other areas.  Today I found a resource that builds scoring rubrics for you.  There are literally thousands to choose from (or should I say from which to choose?!)  You start with a pre-created rubric, and you can tweak it all you want or not at all.  Then as you look at the students' assignments, you just click on the rubric and it actually grades the paper for you!  I'm thinking about the hundreds of hours I spent during my career creating effective rubrics and then painstakingly matching my students' writing to the rubric, when now all you have to do is click!!  Is this a good thing or a bad thing?  I think it's a great thing, but once again I'm reminded that all my best skills are obsolete.

Irate Parents

      Now here's a topic that just flat out confuses me.  Typically, the way this works is a student gets a failing grade and the parent goes after the teacher.  Or a student is given some kind of consequence for inappropriate behavior and the parent goes after the principal.  And when I say "goes after," I mean full force yelling, finger wagging, swearing, threatening, you name it.  I once had a parent tell me that I was her slave and she was my master and she was going to "get" me.  What makes people think that it's OK to behave that way?  If their child got sick, would they blame the doctor?  I can just see it.  "Listen, doc, I don't like the way you diagnosed my kid. I can't believe you used that cold metal stethoscope on him.  If it weren't for your idiotic methods, my child would be completely healthy."  First of all, people don't treat doctors like that  and, secondly, if a parent actually felt that way, he'd just take his kid to a different doctor.  Furthermore, if a child gets a failing grade in school, shouldn't the parents try to find out what the child did (or, more likely, didn't do) to get that failing grade?  Shouldn't the parents be asking the teacher what can be done on the home front to help the kid pass?  And as for school discipline, I've heard every excuse ever invented.  And I'm not talking about the excuses the kids give (I expect that from kids), I'm talking about the excuses their parents give!  I wouldn't go into your home and discipline your child, but when they are in school, I legally act in loco parentis (in absence of parents).  You might be mad at your kid for cheating on that test, but why would you be mad at me for enforcing the ensuing consequence?  The disciplining we do in school is part of the educational process.  We teach them how to read, write, and compute, and these days we have to teach them how to behave like rational human beings as well. When a nasty parent comes in and yells at me I want to say to the student, "See?  That's what I'm talking about. Don't be a jerk like your dad."