As I sat on the ferry prepping for the grading and assessment workshop I would be presenting the following day, I leafed through a few of my favourite resources. I was reviewing “Grading Smarter Not Harder” by BC educator Myron Dueck, when a section heading caught my eye: “Grading Homework Perpetuates the Disadvantages Faced by Lower-Income Students”. He quotes the experiences of a teacher whose student was dealing with utility disconnection:
“I just wanted to share that I stopped grading homework the day I found out that one of my students had to wait until her father came home from work so that she could stand out in the gravel driveway and use the headlights from his truck to compete her homework. It was not fair of me to ask a student to do that. That day, I realized I could never again ask a student to stand outside int he elements just for a homework grade (p.53)”.
I’m not sure if our students face utility disconnection, but I know that they have other challenges. Dueck hits the nail on the head as he follows up on the above teacher’s experience.
“Perhaps our grading policies should be written more explicitly: ‘Any homework assignments that fail to be completed due to violence in the home, eviction, exploitation, mental health issues, depression, or utility disconnection will result in a zero.’ We as educators can never be certain of the reasons that homework is incomplete, so perhaps we should stop assuming that it’s always due to lack of effort.”
It’s not just lack of effort, poverty, or other social issues that keeps kids from getting homework done. Sometimes the genuinely CAN’T get the homework done. It could very well be that they don’t understand what to do or they don’t have the skills to do it. Furthermore, if the homework gets done, how do we know who really did the work? Haven’t we all received the surprisingly great project that we are quite certain Mom or Dad completed? I believe we all value practice. I also believe that we wouldn’t want to penalize our students for factors beyond their control. Let’s make sure that grades we determine are ACCURATE and that we have CONFIDENCE that they truly reflect our “students’ levels of performance in relation to the learning standards set out in the curriculum (BC reporting order, July 2016)”.
