Week 2 Reflection

 Hours Total - 50 (2 hours on Sunday from doing extra help)

Weekly Reflection

I felt like this week I got a lot better at grading essays and giving feedback. I started this week by going over C blocks essays again to add more feedback. A block also had their essays due on Monday so I felt like by the time I had finished adding more feedback to the other class I was more prepared to be more thorough and give more feedback and edits in my first look through rather than needing to go over it again. What I understand now more than I ever did before after having gone through this process is how subjective grading can be. Factors like mood, energy, the time of day, and the order in which the essays are graded can all affect the outcome. It is easy to unknowingly compare the current essay you’re grading to the previous one or two that are the freshest in your memory and grade it relative to those rather than comparing all essays to the same standard. You can go over the same essay several different times over a few days and get a different grade every time. I think that we want to believe that teachers can be objective, but we as humans are constantly being influenced by factors we’re entirely unaware of. It is unrealistic to expect teachers to be any different. 

On a different note, what most surprised me this week was how the students treated the arts and crafts materials in the projection room. All of the classes met there this week so they could work on their capstone projects. As the week progressed, the back of the room where the materials were stored got progressively more and more chaotic. A lot of the kids didn’t always do a good job cleaning up after themselves. There were also a lot of glue sticks with the caps left off and unwashed paintbrushes. I had to scrub paint from the table almost every day using a wet paper towel from the bathroom though, admittedly, it wasn’t actually that hard to clean up. I wasn’t frustrated by this as much as I was surprised. Some of the students seemed to be unfamiliar with the materials and how to take care of them. I kept thinking, how do they not understand that they need to put caps on glue sticks or use something to cover the table when they’re painting? I was talking to Ellie about this and she told me that many of them may not have been in an art class in a long time where there’s a teacher to impose more structure. It is possible they missed out on the typical middle school art class experience, which would explain the behavior.